


One Little Push

by kittyrex



Series: All It Takes [1]
Category: DC Cinematic Universe, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Suicide Squad (2016), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Acrophobia, Arson, Asgard, Asgard (Marvel), Ballroom Dancing, Becoming Harley Quinn, Betrayal, Buckets o' blood, Clint Barton & Natasha Romanov Friendship, Crossover, Crossover Pairings, Cunnilingus, Deception, Dom/sub Undertones, Dream Sex, Elevator Make-Outs, Emotional Manipulation, Escape, F/M, Fight Sex, Floriography, Gaslighting, Hair-pulling, Harley Has a Potty Mouth, Illusions, Insanity, Knifeplay, Library Sex, Light Bondage, Loki Does What He Wants, Loki Is A Jerk, Loki Porn, Loki in chains, Magic, Manipulation, Manipulative Loki, Marvel Norse Lore, Mind Manipulation, Minor Character Death, Minor Original Character(s), My First Fanfic, Negotiations, Nick Fury is Not Amused, Origin Story, Porn With Plot, Post-Avengers (2012), Post-Avengers Asgard, Protective Natasha Romanov, Psychological Drama, Psychology, Puzzles, Rape, References to Norse Religion & Lore, Riddles, Rough Sex, S.H.I.E.L.D., SHIELD, Seduction, Seduction to the Dark Side, Slow Build, Smut, Snark, Spanking, Tango, The Tesseract (Marvel), Tony Being Tony, Trickster Gods, trickery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-12
Updated: 2018-07-06
Packaged: 2019-01-16 10:51:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 35
Words: 73,818
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12341202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittyrex/pseuds/kittyrex
Summary: The Avengers have just won their first victory as a team at the Battle of New York. Despite a lengthy jurisdictional dispute and emphatic resistance from Thor, S.H.I.E.L.D. has opted to retain Loki in their custody for interrogation and examination, rather than release him to Asgardian justice. Held in a high-security, classified facility, his case is turned over to Dr. Harleen Quinzel, a young up-and-comer in S.H.I.E.L.D.’s medical and scientific program. A specialist in criminal and violent behavioral analytics, with a keen interest in the study of metahumans, Dr. Quinzel thinks she’s seen the worst mankind has to offer, but is she prepared for what she’ll find in the mind of a god?





	1. Chapter 1

The  _ click _ of Harleen’s heels on the smooth concrete floor bounced around the corridor. She still hadn’t entirely gotten used to this place, and how long the echoes remained after her passing. How far underground was this, anyway? Most people switched to more practical, softer-soled shoes in very short order after coming here, to avoid the eerie effect, but Harleen liked her shiny red pumps. They were part of her identity.

It was so easy to lose your sense of self in one of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s compounds -- all the surroundings industrial gray, all the agents with their black uniforms and blank faces, all the schedules and procedures set in stone with military rigor, and of course, all the unwilling residents of the compound, locked away behind their iron doors. Dr. Harleen Quinzel, one of the few civilian employees of the facility, thought of herself as a splash of color moving among the monochrome, with her noisy heels and bright white lab coat.

Her friends thought she was crazy for taking the job. Her mentors had tried to push her into child psychology and family counselling --  _ ugh _ . And her family? Well. Harleen was reasonably certain that this was not exactly the future they’d intended for their little girl. It wasn’t even the future she’d intended for herself, working face-to-face with violent criminals and unnatural metahumans, but it just seemed right. She knew better than to fall down the rabbit hole of self-psychoanalysis, but something in her was drawn to these people. They fascinated her in a way she couldn’t rationalize.

Especially this new patient, the one responsible for the incident in New York City, that had caused all that destruction before he was apprehended. A god? An alien? Reports varied, and couldn’t be trusted, regardless. This ‘Loki’  _ certainly _ couldn’t be trusted to accurately self-identify. Even his own brother had contributed to his hefty casefile, with dire warnings of his deceit and manipulations.

“Man, when family turns on you, they really turn, don’t they?” she murmured aloud, paging back through the dossier as she walked. Reading and walking was a terrible habit, she knew, but one she hadn’t gotten around to breaking just yet. There was always some last detail, some brief bit of trivia she wanted to brush up on when she was on her way to a patient interview, especially one as fascinating as this.

She got to the interview room about ten minutes early; it helped to have an established presence and sense of control when dealing with these… well, she would never say “monsters.” That would be politically incorrect, and a bit gauche. When dealing with these… particular individuals of a certain temperament, it was unwise to show up late and flustered. She’d learned that one the hard way.

There was someone waiting for her just outside the door, his arms folded as if he’d been there for hours -- bullshit, given that she’d seen him at breakfast not five minutes ago. She wondered what shortcut to get here before her without being out of breath. “Dr. Quinzel,” he greeted her stonily.

“Dr. Marven,” she returned in a pleasant voice. “Come to wish me luck?”

Dr. Chris Marven was square-shouldered and square-jawed, with stiffly gelled black hair, rectangular-framed glasses, and the worst resting bitch face she’d ever seen on another human being. He’d be handsome, in a very blocky way, she supposed, if he could ever stop scowling and just be a person for half a second.

He snorted at her suggestion. “If you need luck, you may as well give up now. I just thought I’d give you one last chance to back out and let someone who’s  _ earned _ this take over.”

“Aww, still so competitive,” she cooed. “This isn’t -- I’m sorry; remind me where you graduated, again?”

“Stanford,” he replied stiffly, his eyebrows furrowing sharply down in the middle. The expression, combined with the pocket-protector and long black tie he was wearing with his lab coat, gave Harleen a sudden mental image of the professor from Powerpuff Girls, and she fought to keep down an upwelling of giggles.

“This isn’t Stanford anymore, Dr. Marven,” she continued, as syrupy and condescending as possible. She liked making his left eye twitch the way it did whenever she rubbed his nose in one of her victories, especially if she could pretend she’d forgotten about his precious Stanford in the process. On slow days, she and her research assistant liked to keep running tallies of how often they could get him to bring up his  _ alma mater _ in the course of a conversation. “No one’s making valedictorian. No one’s unzipping their pants to compare GPA sizes. We’re all just adults doing our jobs, and I’m absolutely thrilled to be doing  _ mine _ .”

She swept past him into the interview room, and shut the door on him before he could retort. Hands on her hips, Harleen surveyed the room. Nothing fancy: a solid table, bolted to the floor. Molded plastic chairs on either side of it, likewise secured in place. No computer; they had a few too many technopaths pass through this room to allow for more advanced technology than a pocket calculator. Blank, featureless floor, ceiling, and walls, except for the windowless door and the two-way mirror that took up the whole of the far wall.

Harleen never had any idea who was behind it, for there was never a sign of life from the other side. There was usually a guard or two passing through for a random check, the occasional intern writing a report, or perhaps one of her superiors monitoring her work or taking a special interest in the case. Today, the observation room was sure to be packed, as  _ everyone _ had taken a special interest in this case. If Dr. Marven planned on joining them, he’d be too late to get a good spot near the window.

Harleen smirked slightly to herself. She didn’t envy the personnel crammed into the tiny room, and even less so those who hadn’t been able to justify their presence and were forced to sit this one out. Tensions had run high when the assignment had been announced, and a number of nasty things were said about her character and how precisely she might have won the job -- not all of them by her dear rival, Dr. Marven -- but Harleen remained above the fray. She was good,  _ damn  _ good at her job, and she had earned this.

No matter what she’d said about it not being a competition, Loki’s was the kind of case that would  _ finally _ get her ahead. She’d been passed over for a well-deserved promotion for far too long now, but once this assignment was done, they couldn’t possibly keep ignoring her. She’d go over as many heads as she needed to, and might actually get somewhere with a case like his to show for it.

_ Don’t get ahead of yourself, Harley _ , she reminded herself. It was an old childhood nickname that she’d worked hard to shake off. Genetics had blessed and cursed her with baby-blue eyes in a heart-shaped face, a high, girlish voice, bouncy blonde hair, and an even bouncier bosom. Great if your life’s goal was to be a stripper -- not so much if you wanted to be taken seriously as a scientist. Harleen had fought tooth and nail for every inch of professional respect she’d gained, and part of that meant losing babyish endearments, no matter how much she might privately be fond of them.

Face composed into a serene mask for the benefit of her unseen observers, Harleen took her place at the table and tore off the top sheet of her notepad to begin with a fresh page. She jotted down the date and a few other trivial details as she waited, mentally running over the salient facts of the patient.

He arrived exactly on time -- another shining example of the compound’s clockwork efficiency -- flanked by two stone-faced guards, who deposited him in his chair, and left without a word. 

Harleen took her time examining the man -- alien, god, whatever -- seated across from her. Black hair (in obvious need of a good washing) swept back from his angular face and brushed his shoulders. He sat perfectly relaxed in the uncomfortable chair, eyeing her with open mockery in his ice-blue gaze; she had no doubt he was evaluating her as closely as she him. The elaborate gold and green clothing he’d been wearing in the footage she’d seen of him was gone, replaced by a standard gray prisoner’s uniform -- gray like everything else around here.

He wore a standard set of shackles on his wrists -- required, anytime a patient was out of their cell -- and around his neck was a short length of slender, silver chain, like a bad fashion statement. Harleen had seen variations of it on other patients. She didn’t know what technology -- or magic, if you cared about the difference -- made it possible, but Loki’s casefile said his had been specifically formulated to stifle his extra abilities, preventing him from creating the illusions he was known for.

He hadn’t spoken yet, and neither had she. It was an old law enforcement trick, meant to elicit a confession: make the suspect so uncomfortable with silence, he’ll say anything to break it. S.H.I.E.L.D. didn’t give a flying fuck about a confession here. There would be no trial, no jury, no verdict, but it was a useful ploy nonetheless, a convenient glimpse into a patient’s psyche. What’s the first straw he’ll grasp, to end the discomfiting pressure of anticipation?

Apparently, he chose… more silence. It drove on until Harleen herself nearly succumbed and spoke first, their eyes drilling into each other’s. She could be just as stubborn as he could, though, and she hid her irritation behind a bright, welcoming smile -- what she used to call her customer service face, back when she’d been paying her way through med school with a series of painfully tedious retail jobs. He met her smile with a confident smirk. They continued to stare each other down.

After several long minutes, Loki shifted in his chair, leaning forward on his forearms without breaking eye contact. He was openly challenging her now, daring her to speak. Harleen pursed her lips and widened her eyes innocently. She was good at looking innocent.

“So,” he finally drawled. It wasn’t much as first words went, but Harleen’s shoulders tightened with victory.  _ Never back down, Harley. You’ve got this. _ “Do we know when the doctor will be arriving? I assume you’re saving his seat.”

Harleen clenched her jaw furiously. Too late, she realized he was baiting her -- he’d already seen the angry flush rise through her cheeks, and was settling back again in his seat with the same smug satisfaction she’d felt only moments before. One point Harleen, one point Loki. She could work with a tie.

“I am your doctor, Mr. Odinson,” she responded primly, regaining her mask. “My name is Harleen Quinzel, and I will be overseeing your mental analysis.”

“My name is Loki Laufeyson,” he corrected her, “and you would do well to remember it. I no longer share my brother’s name. Odin may have taken me in, but I am the son of Laufey, King of the Giants.”

“Have you always felt the need to distance yourself from your adopted family?” Harleen asked, noting down the correction, along with the nonsense about the giants. He didn’t look much like a giant to her.

“Ah, I see we have concluded with the niceties,” Loki said, folding one long leg across the other. “From what I understand, this is the part where I sob to you my sordid family history and my sad, neglected childhood, yes? Shall I tell you about the time Thor held me underwater so long my heart stopped? It was actually quite a fun game, but I don’t expect you to relate; your civilization wasn’t old enough to remember yet.”

“You’ve mentioned your brother twice now,” Harleen observed, continuing to write long, looping lines across her notepad. “Were you close when you were young?”

“Oh, please, let us not talk about my brother!” Loki exhaled dramatically. “Anything but that. Thor this and Thor that… You must know how it is, if you have any siblings. Do you, Miss Quinzel?”

“Doctor,” Harleen corrected automatically, not looking up from her notes.

“Miss Doctor? Unusual name, but I never did pretend to understand Midgardian nomenclature.”

Harleen flicked her eyes up from the chart to meet his, which were twinkling merrily above a mouth set in a far-too-innocent expression. To her surprise, she almost smiled back at him -- genuinely, this time. It was a stupid joke, and an unoriginal one, but… she was actually having  _ fun. _ As much as she loved her job, it had never before been what she would call “fun.” Violent meatheads and vicious psychopaths might have fascinating mental illnesses or intriguing social deviations, but they weren’t exactly entertaining conversationalists.

She could see now why Loki was such a dangerous man. Even without his illusions, there was something magnetic about him. Harleen had met charismatic people before, but all of them looked like awkward, nervous idiots next to Loki. There was something about him that made you want to like him immediately. And even worse, something that made you want  _ him _ to like  _ you.  _ That was a slippery slope to fall down, so Harleen suppressed the grin and refused to be amused.

“Hilarious, Mr. Laufeyson,” she commented drily. “And we’re not here to discuss  _ my _ family. Would you describe yours --”

“Lord of all Liars, Maker of Mischief, Silver-Tongued Son of Secrets, Prince of Illusions, God of Trickery, rightful inheritor to the throne of the All-Father, and future ruler of the Nine Realms,” he interrupted.

Harleen stared at him, nonplussed.

“Well, Dr. Quinzel,” Loki said, looking wounded, “if you’re going to insist on your correct title, I don’t see why you can’t use mine.”

“Be reasonable,” Harleen chided gently, trying for a warmer tack. “We can hardly have a decent conversation around that mouthful, now can we?”

“I don’t mind if you abbreviate it to ‘Lord,’” Loki conceded modestly.

Harleen raised an eyebrow at him. “Lord Loki Laufeyson of… what was it… Liars?” she asked. “Fond of alliteration, are we?”

“It’s the poet in me,” he responded with a thespian sigh, spreading his arms as far as the shackles would allow. “My one true weakness.”

“Well, then, Mr. L,” she replied, smoothing her face back into a professional veneer. “Let’s get to know each other, shall we?”


	2. Chapter 2

It had been months since her first interview with Loki Laufeyson, and Harleen was no closer to getting to know him. His unwavering and unflappable lack of behavioral changes from any of the medications she’d put him on didn’t entirely surprise her -- who knew what allowances had to be made for Asgardian psychopharmacology, after all, or if he could even metabolize anything that had been developed? -- but even straightforward verbal analysis eluded her. Harleen felt like that should have been insanely frustrating, but, oddly, it didn't really bother her.

She'd moved his sessions to three times a week, ostensibly because of his unusual resistance to treatment, but she knew there was more to it than that, that she wasn't admitting to herself. For the first time in her career, possibly in her entire life, she felt like she was speaking to an equal. Their cat-and-mouse conversations were the first genuinely challenging game she'd played since she couldn't remember when.

Harleen hadn't even realized how much she'd grown accustomed to dumbing herself down just to be understood, until the first time Loki called her out on it during one of their conversations, accusing her of insulting him by adopting a child’s understanding of the metaphilosophical point they were debating at the time.

She was used to seeing the cognitive dissonance on people's faces, as they tried to rationalize her chirpy, lisping voice (with just the barest trace of Joisey in it -- her dialect was another necessary victim in her ongoing crusade to retain at least some respect as a scientist) with the enthusiastic stream of complex terminology it was speaking, tried to juxtapose the extensive list of qualifications and credentials she had on paper with the cherry-red shoes and overflowing cleavage in front of them.

It became easier over time, she supposed, to meet their expectations just a little bit, to give them the beauty-and-brains combo strike only so far as they could keep up with her. Otherwise, Harleen had found, she tended to get shut out, and she hated feeling isolated unless  _ she _ were the one keeping everyone else out.

It seemed only fitting that a self-professed master of illusion was the only one who seemed to see beneath the surface. Although careful to maintain her professionalism, Harleen felt like she could be herself with him more than with anybody else, if only because he would see it whether or not she chose to show it.

Not that he was easy to get along with, by any means. He vacillated at apparent random among scathing sarcasm, easy-going gregariousness, hissing menace, and flirtatious wit and charm. It was exhausting, some days, just to keep up with him, but Harleen couldn't shake the feeling that there was some underlying pattern to his mood swings, some secondary or even tertiary conversation they were having between the lines. If she could just figure out what it was, she felt sure it was the key to finally seeing inside his head.

It was an exhilarating feeling, constantly being on the edge of solving a puzzle she was sure no one else could crack. No one else even seemed to want to, anymore; the excitement caused by Loki’s arrival had waned surprisingly quickly. Harleen was glad, because the whispered jealousy disappeared with it, leaving her to focus on Loki's case without distraction, and without the dozens of invisible eyes staring in on their conversations. She'd needed to drop off some paperwork in the observation room before today's session, and the only inhabitant was one of the R&D people, using it to get in a quiet nap.

Just as well. She liked having Loki all to herself. He was apparently in a good mood today, chatting easily, and with much fewer quick-changes than usual.

“Gotten anywhere yet, Doctor?” he was asking cheerfully. “We both know I'm -- what's the mortal expression? -- ‘mad as a hatter,’ but surely you've come up with some more exact diagnosis by now?”

Harleen countered his question with another question. “Do you consider yourself mad, Mr. L?” The abbreviation had stuck, somehow. “Mr. Laufeyson” seemed too formal, “Loki” too familiar, and she refused to dignify that “Lord” business.

“Doesn't everyone?” he asked in turn. They were playing the question game now, apparently. He seemed to like that one.

“Do you mean, ‘Doesn't everyone consider themselves mad,’ or, ‘Doesn't everyone consider  _ you _ mad?’”

“Who says the two are mutually exclusive?”

Harleen smiled. She'd long since given up trying to hide her expressions. He saw right through her, anyway; that had been apparent since day one.

“Let's stay on track, Mr. L.,” she chided, dropping the game. “I believe Dr. Banner once used the term ‘brain like a bag of cats.’ Do you feel that's a fair assessment of your mental state?”

“Madness is an interesting thing, Dr. Quinzel,” Loki said, suddenly serious and intent. He stood and leaned over the table, as close as he ever got to her, fixing his gaze on her face. “It shows up in all sorts of unexpected places, doesn't it? I wonder…” His voice dropped to a whisper. Harleen, usually the champion of staring contests, suddenly, desperately wanted to look away, but found herself unable to break eye contact. “If I broke your head open,” he hissed, “how many little kittens might I find tumbling around inside your shattered skull?”

He licked his lips slowly, intentionally, as though savoring the idea of a delicious meal. Harleen tried to swallow, but the motion got stuck in her throat. She realized suddenly that she was leaning over the table as well, pulled forward by some compulsion she didn’t recognize. Loki was grinning savagely, his face mere inches from hers. She still couldn’t tear her eyes away from his. They looked darker than usual, deeper somehow. Her vision blurred, and they overlapped into a single point like a bottomless pit. She was pitching forward into it, weightless, helpless, grasping at empty air to slow her fall while stars and comets sped faster and faster above her.

“Doctor?”

The word was sharp, sudden, a bright point of harsh reality cutting through the darkness. Harleen inhaled in a strangled gasp, the air feeling alien and too-cold in her lungs, like she’d forgotten how to breathe. She blinked rapidly, the familiar gray room crashing back into place around her, and felt the solid, cold plastic of the chair underneath pressing into her legs.

Loki was leaning back in his chair, casually at ease. There was no sign he had ever moved, or that she had, for that matter. His head was tilted curiously at her. “My, my, Dr. Quinzel,” he chided her. “Don’t tell me you’re falling asleep on me. My pride would be ever so wounded.”

“I --” she tried to begin. The word came out harsh and strangled. Harleen cleared her throat and removed her reading glasses to massage her eyes. A headache was blossoming in her temple, and she could still see the stars rushing past her when she pressed on her eyes. “I apologize, Mr. L,” she managed more clearly, replacing her glasses. “Up too late last night researching, I suppose. I’m sorry -- what was the last thing you said to me?”

Loki folded his long fingers behind his head and examined the ceiling. “I was merely suggesting that Dr. Banner is perhaps not well-equipped to speculate on the sanity of others,” he replied loftily. “But I can see how such tedious observations might bore you. I’ll keep them to myself from now on.”

“I’ll remind you, Mr. L, that you may feel free to share any thoughts with me that you feel are productive,” Harleen said. She was back on familiar ground now. Whatever had happened… well, she wanted to suspect Loki was responsible, but with his powers chained, she didn’t see how he could have been. Maybe she really was just short on sleep. When was the last time she’d eaten properly, for that matter? The extra time she’d been taking with Loki’s case had given her a backlog of other patients whose files she’d been neglecting until the early hours of the morning.

Tomorrow, she’d make a point of eating a full breakfast and taking some time for herself. For now, she had a megalomaniac with a bruised ego to deal with.


	3. Chapter 3

Harleen never did get that full breakfast. Her catastrophe of a morning began with sleeping through her alarm for the first time in years, probably due to the bizarre dreams that plagued her all night -- the kind she usually only had after eating too much Thai take-out. God, but she’d kill for some take-out, or any food that didn’t come from the compound’s unimaginative cafeteria.

Maybe in a few months, she’d take a few days to get back to New Jersey for a little while. Go nuts on junk food, catch up with old friends, remind herself what colors look like, see actual sunshine, or even any weather at all. That hallucination yesterday was the first time she’d seen the stars since she-couldn’t-remember-when, and they’d come back with interest in the middle of the night.

Harleen rubbed the sleep out of her eyes, still exhausted. She had dreamed that she sat up in bed and found herself in the middle of a darkened, empty ballroom. There were lonely tables scattered around the far edges of the room, and the walls were paneled with some kind of tapestries or paintings that seemed to tell a story, but were too distant and dimly-lit to understand. When she looked up, she saw the room had no ceiling, but opened to a vast, shimmering cosmos, the stars and planets brighter and clearer than she’d ever seen in real life. There was no moon that she could see.

It reminded her of the sense of falling she’d had in the interview room, and she shivered slightly. She swung her legs out of bed and let her bare feet rest on the polished dance floor. It felt cold and hard, like the concrete of the S.H.I.E.L.D. facility. When she stood up, the bed disappeared behind her, leaving her alone in the center of the vast space. She curled her arms nervously around herself, and vaguely noticed that the worn, oversized baseball jersey she wore as a nightshirt had been replaced by a slinky, sleeveless red number that caught and reflected the distant glow of the stars. When she looked down, she was wearing her favorite shoes, but still felt the cold of the floor on the bottoms of her feet. It didn’t surprise her much; dreams came with all sorts of odd discrepancies.

She stared up at the sky, trying to find any familiar constellations. It was a strange thing to do, really. A city girl, born and bred, she’d only seen diagrams of them in textbooks before, and wasn’t sure she’d recognize the patterns, even if they were right in front of her. While she was staring, a gentle tap came on her left shoulder.

Harleen gasped and whirled around. The sound felt strange, dampened, like the room was much smaller than it appeared.  _ Stupid brain, forgetting to simulate spatial dimensions correctly.  _ Even in dreams, there was always an irritatingly rational, analytical voice running constant commentaries at the back of her mind. Harleen had long since gotten used to ignoring it. There were more interesting things to focus on, like the god standing before her.

Well, given how much time she’d been dedicating to Loki and his case lately, it only made sense that he’d show up in her subconscious. She would have expected that she’d picture him in the gray uniform she was used to seeing, or even the robes he’d been wearing in the footage she’d seen, but instead, her dream apparently decided to shake things up a bit. He was wearing a dark suit, finely tailored, with even darker pinstripes, and a narrow tie that seemed to reflect back a different color every time her gaze shifted, in an ominous, sickly way, like an oil spill. Gold winked at her from cufflinks on both wrists and a tie-pin centered on his chest. He wasn’t wearing his shackles or the silver collar.

Without a word, dream-Loki extended a hand to her, a serious expression on his face. Harleen took his hand, equally silent. The moment their fingertips touched, a distant tune began,  [ a single violin playing a tango ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMqVoUQVlCU) . The music sounded lost and lonely, echoing eerily around the vast hall ( _ about time, brain,  _ the analytical voice said at the back of her mind).

His skin felt ice-cold and unnaturally smooth. ( _ I wonder if he even has any fingerprints, if he’s supposed to be a god and everything. I’ll have to look when I’m awake. _ ) He locked her fingers in his with a surprisingly strong grip and pulled her to him, resting his other hand behind her bare shoulder. They began to dance to the music, Loki leading with elegant grace, and Harleen stumbling in his wake, doing her best to follow the steps of half-remembered classes from long ago.  _ You’d think my own dream would let me be a decent dancer. _

Muscle memory, or possibly just dream logic, kicked in after a few turns around the floor, and they settled into an easy rhythm, back and forth to the time of the violin. He led her into a spin, and when she came back into his arms, he was smiling like a cat with the proverbial canary.

“Hello, kitten,” he said. Harleen shuddered at the memory of his -- imagined? -- threat yesterday after the ‘bag of cats’ comment, and his smile widened.

“Hello, Mr. L,” she replied quietly. He gave her another half-spin, so her arms crossed around her waist, holding his hands at her sides. Even in a dream, it felt dangerous to have Prince Loki, Lord of all Liars at her back.

“Still so formal,” he murmured in her ear. “That will change.” Releasing her hands, he lifted her from the waist and rotated slowly, holding her aloft like she weighed nothing. Whether from instinct or impulse or an old fear of heights coming back to haunt her, she draped one arm around his neck, steadying herself on his shoulders. When he set her down at the end of the turn, the music’s pace quickened and their steps became more elaborate. She barely even noticed what her own feet were doing; they seemed to be handling themselves fine on their own and she was suddenly, acutely aware of Loki’s body pressing against hers as they danced.

“I’ve been thinking,” he mused, taking her through another spin. “Much as I mock my brother’s predilections, they make a certain sort of sense, when viewed in a particular light.”

His words didn’t make any sense, but then, she didn’t expect them to. It was all just dream-nonsense anyway, and she was still distracted by the intensity of his presence. The chill of his skin made her feel feverish by comparison, and their dance kept her too dizzy to think clearly.

“...mistake is his ridiculous notion of ‘love,’” he was saying. She wasn’t sure how much she’d missed. He twined one leg around hers, released it, and dipped her backwards. Without quite meaning to, Harleen blindly followed the music and wrapped her other leg tightly around his waist. He was still speaking, but his words were distant, incomprehensible, tangled up with the hypnotizing melody of the violin.

“...even a fragile instrument can serve its purpose…” Loki deepened the pressure until she was nearly parallel with the floor, her free leg sliding out between his, and she clung even tighter with the other to keep from falling. When he pulled her back upright, she could hear her heart thumping loudly in her ears, her chest locked closely against his. “What matter how quickly a tool may break, if it comes readily to hand, and one can make use of it for however long it may last?”

He had one arm wrapped around her back, pulling them even more closely together. With her chin tilted up to see his face, their lips were barely an inch apart. He found the slit in her dress and ran his other hand slowly up the back of her free leg, a wave of goosebumps following wherever he touched. When he met her thigh, he tightened his grip and lifted her again; Harleen extended her leg to point off to one side, and they spun in place.

Faster and faster they whirled, the violin building to a thin crescendo. Harleen closed her eyes to block out the blur of the spinning ballroom, and felt Loki’s lips moving directly against her ear.

“I believe I shall make use of you, Dr. Harleen Quinzel,” he whispered, so softly she could barely make out the words. “I believe you’ll turn out to be very, very useful indeed.”

Harleen opened her mouth to reply, not sure what she was planning to say, but the music abruptly stopped, and Loki’s arms loosened around her. She felt him snake his away out of her grip, and he dropped her. There was another gut-wrenching sense of falling for a split second, and Harleen braced herself to meet the cold, hard floor, but found herself crashing back into her own bed.

Breathing raggedly, heart thudding in her chest, she looked around. There was no ballroom, no open sky, no music. No Loki. Only her private quarters at the compound, empty, dimly lit by the track of pale utility lighting lining the edges of the room. She was wearing her baseball jersey, and her shoes were still in the corner where she’d kicked them earlier that evening.

Grumbling to herself, Harleen wriggled back underneath the covers -- she’d somehow managed to roll herself on top of them -- and went back to sleep. None of the rest of her dreams that night were quite as vivid, but they chased her with laughing gods and plummeting falls for hours afterwards.

She didn’t wake up for her alarm in the morning, but she did wake up an hour later to the sound of the compound’s panic alarm.


	4. Chapter 4

“For fuck’s sake,” Harleen moaned, rubbing her eyes to block out the flashing red lights. “If it’s another fucking drill a-fucking-gain, I swear to fucking god…”

She continued in this vein while she grumpily dug clothing out of drawers and battled her hair into into her customary tight bun, every yell of the alarm klaxon sending a railroad spike through her ears.  _ Why am I  _ this  _ fucking tired for having gotten  _ more _ sleep?  _ she wondered, pulling on her lab coat and clipping her badge to her lapel.  _ I know, I know. Fucking delta sleep waves. You’re a fucking scientist, Harley. But it’s not fucking fair. _

The closest emergency convergence point to her quarters was a dingy break room a few corridors down. Harleen had mostly gotten the swearing and muttering out of her system by the time she got there, and milled around with the rest of the scientists and agents who’d been nearby when the alarm sounded. At least the room had a coffee machine.

Harleen clung to the paper cup of sweet, life-giving nectar like she expected someone to try and steal it from her, and eyeballed the rest of the room while she sipped. You could always tell how long any given person had been stationed at the facility by how scared they looked during alarms. The newest recruits were wide-eyed and whispering, some agents and interns were relatively calm as they chatted among themselves, but jumped at unexpected noises or sudden movements, and most people -- Harleen included -- just seemed bored and annoyed.

Between the surprise drills, the false alarms, and the everyday disasters that were bound to pop up from their particular brand of research subjects, there was always  _ something _ or other causing an alarm. It was very rarely dangerous for anybody except whatever poor redshirts were present when the shit hit the fan, which meant that everybody else usually ended up wasting the morning standing around their convergence point and waiting to hear the juicy details later. Which subject ripped whose arm off, whose fault it was, and who was going to get promoted into the new opening later -- normal office gossip stuff.

Harleen felt mostly human again by the end of the second cup of coffee, and settled in to try and get some paperwork out of the way while she had the time, grateful that she’d remembered to grab her bag in her grumpy daze earlier. The notes and forms kept her mind off of last night’s crazy dreams, and she managed to work her way through a good bit of backlog by the time the all-clear sounded.

Today wasn’t a Loki day, so she visited with her other patients throughout the afternoon, but found it difficult to keep her mind on their cases.  _ Why do people keep trying to replicate the Captain America serum? _ she wondered wearily, tuning out Will Simpson’s frankly rather oedipal rantings while she pretended to take notes.  _ Sure, it’d be nice to have an army full of Steve Rogerses, but you’d think by now, someone would have sat all the military leaders of the world down for a nice, long talk about sunk cost fallacies. _

Simpson seemed to pick up on her lack of attention and began working himself up into a full-blown rage. Harleen cut their meeting short and sent a message over to the dispensary to up his blue pill intake. They’d have to come up with a new chemical cocktail for him soon -- he was starting to metabolize this one far too quickly -- but that was a problem for someone-not-Harleen. Her job was just to keep ’em talking, and see what came out.

The rest of her visits went more smoothly, but Harleen remained distracted and irritable throughout the day. She kept seeing stars and planets whenever she closed her eyes, and was starting to lose faith in her eyes even when they were open. Non-Euclidean shadows and nonsensical motions seemed to keep showing up around the margins of her vision.

Harleen stopped by the on-site oculist when she had a gap in her schedule later that week, but her prescription was fine. He recommended aspirin and a lighter caseload. Reluctantly, Harleen delegated three of her easier patients to her research assistant and scaled back the visitations with everybody else except Loki. Weird dreams aside, he was still her highest-priority patient.

 

It wasn’t just her; the rest of the facility seemed jumpier and more tense than usual. They had three more lockdowns over the next week, because the patients kept getting more violent and the agents more easily spooked. It was like there was a bad storm brewing, or a full moon, even though variances in weather and moon phases had never bothered anyone in the facility before, this far underground.

Harleen’s eyesight problems were getting worse, despite her efforts. She kept getting the impression someone was standing just outside her peripheral vision, no matter which way her head was turned. At first glance, she’d keep mistaking colleagues for strangers, and vice versa, and after a few awkward cases of mistaken identity, she fell into the habit of double- and triple-checking who she was talking to before she opened her mouth.

The dreams were getting worse too. She hadn’t had any this strange or vivid since… well, it had been a tough time that she didn’t care to dwell on, but going cold turkey off antidepressants could do strange things to the subconscious. Loki was featuring more and more frequently among these new dreams. In one, she was swinging on a trapeze inside a circus tent made of the same night sky she’d seen above the ballroom, while he strolled casually across a tightrope above her. She kept swinging higher, trying to reach his level, and he kept dancing just out of reach.

In another, she was sitting across from him in their usual interview room, and couldn’t figure out why the room looked backwards until she realized their seats were reversed, and he was the one asking probing questions about her mental state and taking notes on her responses.

No bonus points for interpreting  _ that _ one: Harleen felt like she was going crazy. She thought about reducing her workload further, but didn’t want to draw attention to herself. The last thing she needed was for someone to notice her buckling under the stress and declare her mentally unfit to do her job.

What she really needed was for the Loki dreams to just stop. They were stupid and unprofessional and completely outside of her control, but she’d be damned if she let them affect her work. Maybe she couldn’t keep her subconscious from doing whatever it wanted while she slept, but she could and  _ did _ hold a tight rein on her thoughts during the day, forcing him out of her head except when she was actively working on his case.

Ironically enough, the real Loki was one of her last bastions of sanity. Their conversations were oases of time when she felt completely in control for once. He was crazy; she was sane. He was the patient; she was the doctor. Everything was correct and as it should be, as long as he was sitting on his side of the table and she on hers.

The only difficulty was in keeping him firmly separated in her mind from the imaginary Loki. She was starting to see him more often at night than she did even during their frequent sessions, and was finding it occasionally difficult to keep track of what they’d actually spoken about and what had only come up in dream conversations. Her recordkeeping became more diligent, her speech around him more careful. Safe behind her table and her notepad, she built the wall of professional calm ever higher while every night chipped away at it again.

Still, dreams aside, their real-world conversations were genuinely fascinating in their own right. Loki was the only Asgardian that S.H.I.E.L.D. had in custody, and Thor had never volunteered for his own on-the-record examination, so much of Harleen’s work was completely uncharted, especially given Loki’s rather fluid relationship with the truth. Unraveling the fact and fiction from each other felt like a translating a dead language nobody had even attempted before. It was exciting and mysterious and deeply professionally fulfilling.

She couldn’t deny that she got a personal enjoyment out of their sessions, either. Despite how difficult he was -- possibly  _ because _ of how difficult he was -- that feeling of like-mindedness, of finally meeting her mental equal hadn’t faded. She wasn’t sure what that said about her, that she felt more in common with Loki than she did anyone else she’d met in her career, and she wasn’t sure how much of that came from the real person, and how much from the version she’d constructed in her head.

She caught herself watching him more carefully during their sessions, searching for inconsistencies, trying to mentally bookmark any differences she could find to help distinguish waking from sleeping. Unfortunately, Loki caught her watching too.

“You’re scrutinizing me rather closely today, Dr. Quinzel,” he observed, steepling his fingers and staring back at her over them.

“It  _ is _ my job to study you,” she reminded him.

“Ah, yes, your job,” he replied shrewdly. “Is  _ that _ why you can’t seem to take your eyes from me?”

The color rose in Harleen’s cheeks. “Yes, it is,” she lied sharply. “Now --”

“Your  _ job _ doesn’t explain why can’t stop thinking about me,” Loki interrupted mockingly. The warmth in Harleen’s face erupted into a full red.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she snorted, trying to sound dismissive, but Loki was standing, pushing up off the table with long-fingered hands, and she blinked at them and realized he wasn’t shackled anymore. Come to think of it, he hadn’t been a moment ago when he’d been looking at her over steepled fingers, either. Was he wearing them when the guards had brought him in? She hadn’t thought to look. Why wouldn’t he have been?

Jumping to her feet and glancing sideways at the two-way mirror to futilely try and see if there were any observers present, she reached for the mechanical buzzer under the table that would call for the guards. Before she could find it, Loki was there, closer to her than he’d ever been in reality. He had a musky, ozone-y scent she couldn’t quite place, odd but pleasant, almost otherworldly, and he put himself between her and the table with predatory grace.

“Don’t think I’ve been blind to the way your manner towards me has changed,” he purred, pressing forward. “Tell me, is it fear or desire that widens those innocent eyes whenever you cast them on me? A little of both, perhaps?”

Harleen took a few panicky steps backwards, almost tripping over her chair, and Loki followed closely. There was no sound of running feet in the corridor to show help was on the way. They were alone.

“And tell me, little kitten,” he continued softly, pacing relentlessly forward. Harleen put a hand behind her and groped blindly for the wall she was sure to run into at any moment. “How is it that you explain to yourself why you dream of me nearly every night?”

Harleen gasped, and could only stare blankly at him for a moment. She found the wall, and was trapped against it as Loki tugged a stray lock of hair free at the side of her face, toying with it lazily.

“How could you possibly kn--?” His lips cut off her words, molding themselves to hers with icy and uncompromising force. Harleen responded instinctively, pushing back up against him with closed eyes and parted lips, but only a second or two after closing her eyes, he was gone.

She snapped her eyes back open again, but instead of the interview room, Harleen once again found her own dimly-lit quarters. Goddammit; dreaming again.

This was getting out of hand. It was getting more realistic -- not to mention more personal -- by the night. In the morning, she’d have to figure out what to do about it, but for now, she desperately needed what little sleep she could get. Rolling over restlessly, she closed her eyes and tried firmly to put Loki out of her mind long enough to get back  to sleep.

That was a mistake. The rest of the night brought with it the most personal, and the most terrifying, Loki dream yet.


	5. Chapter 5

Harleen woke up in a bright, sunshiney room. In contrast to the shadowy, mysterious ballroom the dreams had started with, everything here felt oversaturated and too-real, almost harshly so. Harleen looked to her right and realized that all the light was coming from massive plate glass windows that took up the whole of one wall.

It was daytime? How long had she slept? No, that couldn’t be right. How would daylight even get to the compound? S.H.I.E.L.D. could kid themselves all they wanted, but their “healthy natural light” lamps could never be mistaken for the real thing. It had to be another dream.

Harleen craned around to look at the rest of the room. It was very high-class, very art deco, with gleaming metal and polished marble and geometric crystal. An elegant fireplace was set into the far wall from the foot of her bed, and a recessed pit to the left held long, sweeping couches and plush armchairs. Stairs zigzagged up and down to more seating areas, like a wannabe Escher drawing.

Harleen climbed out of bed and took a few steps towards the window -- not too close, though. The floor-to-ceiling glass made her nervous. She was expecting the bed to disappear behind her again, like it had before, but it stayed put, a rigid, industrial little cot stuck incongruously in the middle of the lavishness of the penthouse. She peered at it suspiciously, then turned to look at her transparent reflection in the glass. No fancy wardrobe changes this time -- just herself, barefooted, in her usual nightshirt, with her hair still in the two braids she’d started wearing to sleep. She’d been sleeping so restlessly lately that she found it a lot easier to brush out her hair in the morning if she braided it before bed.

Refocusing her eyes past her own reflection, she realized that the clear, familiar outline of the Chrysler Building was prominently centered in the cityscape before her. New York City? But then --

A sudden, reflected motion in the glass caused Harleen to spin around, searching the room. A man was descending one of the staircases, casually strolling toward a well-stocked bar. He didn’t seem to see her or the bed, and it took her a moment to recognize him as the CEO of Stark Industries. Tony Stark seemed older than he looked on his  _ Wired  _ cover, more tired than he acted during his WHiH interview. He rolled his sleeves up at the bar, and poured himself a drink.

“Please, tell me you’re going to appeal to my humanity.”

That wasn’t Stark talking. Harleen recognized the voice all too well. Distracted by Stark’s arrival, she had her back turned to the new arrival, and spun again to face him.

Loki strode slowly into the room, proud in all his Asgardian glory, as she’d never before seen him except in shaky footage and blurry photos. One hand loosely gripped the scepter she recognized from the pictures.

He didn’t seem to see her either, as he stalked towards Stark; she was a ghost, an observer looking in on the past. The undamaged New York skyline made sense now; this dream seemed to be taking place mere moments before the Incident. She’d read that Loki and Stark had a brief confrontation in Stark Tower before the battle began, hadn’t she?

“Actually, I’m planning to threaten you,” Stark replied off-handedly.

Without warning, Loki lifted the scepter, and a pale blue beam of energy lanced across the room -- narrowly missing Harleen, but raising the hair on her arms as it passed -- and slammed into Stark’s throat.

There was a strangled cry, the sizzle of cooking meat, and Stark collapsed, jerking and twitching. He tried to catch himself on a barstool, which fell to the ground with him with a horrible metallic crash, but it was obvious that he was dead when he hit the ground, his face contorted in agony.

“You should have left your armor on for that,” Loki said coolly to his corpse.

Harleen screamed.

“No, no, no, no, no,” she babbled panickedly, clapping her hands over her mouth. “That’s wrong! This isn’t how it happened!”

Stark couldn’t be dead. He’d been instrumental in the Battle of New York, saved countless lives. How could he have done that if he died here, before the battle even began?

“This isn’t real,” she whispered, trying to remind herself that this was just a bad dream, silently pleading for that calm, analytical background voice to come back when she needed it. “This isn’t what happened. This isn’t what happened.”

“Isn’t it?”

Harleen stiffened, eyes wide, and looked up at Loki. He was looking right back at her, a half-smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. If he didn’t see her before, he sure as hell did now.

“Perhaps what you recall was simply a... rehearsal, as it were.” He was advancing on her with the same menacing grace he’d had toward Stark just a moment before. “I’ve learned a few lessons, adapted my technique. The key is to not let the fool begin talking, and to be careful where you aim with him.”

Harleen’s eyes flicked nervously towards the scepter. There were all sorts of silly stories about what happened to people who died in their dreams. Harleen was usually one to scoff at such speculative nonsense, but suddenly, with Stark’s dead body just across the room, it didn’t seem worth the risk to find out.

Loki caught her glance and chuckled. He lifted the scepter and Harleen winced, but he merely played with it, spinning it idly between his hands as he stalked toward her. He stopped right in front of her and held the scepter’s point over her heart. 

“It would be so easy,” he murmured to himself, gazing down at her chest. Harleen could feel the cold, sharp metal through the thin fabric of her jersey. “Too easy, I think.”

He withdrew the weapon. “Kneel,” he commanded. Harleen barely heard the order, and didn’t process it. She was frozen in place, her eyes still locked on the sharp edge of the scepter.

“ _ KNEEL! _ ” he screamed suddenly, right in her face. Harleen’s knees buckled, and she sank to the ground. She didn’t think her legs would have held her, even if it had occurred to her to resist. Immediately calm again, Loki began to pace in a slow circle around her, examining her from all sides. Harleen kept her eyes fixed on the ground in front of her, not daring to track his movements.

She felt the tip of the scepter dragging along her shoulder as he passed by her right-hand side, so lightly it didn’t even tear her shirt, just gave the barest whisper of its presence. “Tell me you fear me,” he demanded.

That was easy enough. Harleen swallowed. “I fear you,” she said truthfully, staring determinedly downward.

He kept walking around behind her, and the scepter found her left shoulder. “Tell me you love me.”

_ Just a dream, Harley. Nothing you say matters.  _ “I… love you?” The declaration didn’t exactly ring with confidence, but Loki seemed to accept it.

He completed the circle and turned the scepter over, using its point to lift her chin and force her to meet his eyes. “Tell me you will obey me. Swear that you will heed my words, immediately and without question, at the cost of your own life, if necessary.”

_ It’s just a dream _ , she repeated to herself.  _ Just another weird dream. Just get through it. You’ll wake up any second, and none of this will matter. _

“I swear,” she whispered.

Loki increased the pressure on the scepter so its point dug painfully into her throat and forced her to rise unsteadily to her feet to avoid drawing blood. When she was fully standing, he pressed forward, backing her right up against the window, and tossed the scepter carelessly to one side.

“Oh, kitten,” he said, chuckling and ruffling her hair with a strange, sudden affection. “I wish I could believe you.”

He suddenly tightened his fingers in her hair and pulled her head sideways, slamming it into the glass. Sharp tears blurred Harleen’s eyes and she went dizzy. When her vision cleared, he had her pressed face first into the window, and Harleen was staring down at the ground nearly a thousand feet below. She screamed again, but only briefly; the sound died in her throat when he yanked harshly on her hair again.

He was right behind her, pressed even closer than in the dream where they were dancing. Harleen wanted to close her eyes, but could sense that he’d retaliate again if she did. He wanted her to see this. She was forced to watch, trying to stare anywhere but at the nauseating drop just a few inches past her toes, as dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of monstrous creatures came pouring out of the skies and into the city.

On one accidental glance towards the ground, she caught side of a large, green shape lying motionless in the street. It could only be one person. There were other figures scattered around him, the size of ants, indistinguishable from this distance. None of them were moving.

Hulk down. Stark dead. Harleen didn’t know what had happened to the other Avengers, but it seemed safe to assume that none of them were coming to the rescue. Not for New York, and not for her. The invaders swarmed uncontested through the city, leaving dead bodies and destroyed buildings wherever they passed.

Loki released her hair and took hold of her wrists instead, pinning them against the glass so she couldn’t move. “You’re not mine yet,” he told her, in soft, conversational tones. In the window’s reflection, she could see his face bent right next to hers, gazing out upon the city as well. “But you will be. The foundation has been laid, and in due time, you will belong to me, mind, body, and soul.”

He was clearly having a very different reaction to the destruction of New York City than Harleen was. She could feel his excitement pressing into her back, pinned as she was between the window and his unyielding body. Harleen, in turn, finally couldn’t take the dizzying sight anymore, and squeezed her eyes shut, her breath coming in ragged gasps just shy of hyperventilation. Even with her eyes closed, the bottom fell out of her stomach every time she remembered how far away the ground was.

That seemed to frustrate Loki. “You are  _ not  _ this weak, Harleen!” he growled harshly into her ear. “You’ll understand soon; you’ll see that I’m helping you! If you’re this easily conquered by petty mortal fears, I’ve been wasting my time on you. This victory, in all its glorious might, could be  _ ours _ if you stop clinging to this charade.”

It didn’t make sense. None of this made sense.  _ Of course it doesn’t. It’s a dream. Dreams aren’t supposed to make sense. Just wake up, and it will all go away.  _ It didn’t work. Harleen couldn’t rationalize her terror away, no matter what she said to herself.

“Fine, then,” Loki hissed. He jerked her back from the window and shoved her roughly back towards the center of the room. At first, Harleen was so relieved and almost even grateful that she she didn’t care what he might do next until she realized where he was taking her.

Pushed backwards by Loki, she didn’t see her bed, still awkwardly misplaced in Stark’s penthouse, until it caught her in the back of the knees and she fell clumsily backwards onto it. Loki followed, holding her down on the bed with one hand around her throat.

Harleen bucked wildly, beating his chest with her fists and trying desperately to scramble out from under him and away as soon as she realized what he intended. It didn’t even phase Loki. He had more leverage and more strength than she did, and barely even seemed to notice her escape attempts. He squeezed her throat, not enough to completely cut off her air, but enough to make her dizzy and lightheaded, incapable of screaming or fighting back.

“I’m growing impatient, little kitten,” he growled, bearing down over her. “I’ll have your mind soon enough, and your soul will follow, but I will have your body  _ now! _ ”

“No!” Harleen barely managed to gasp around his hand. “I don’t -- belong -- to anyone. Not even -- you!”

With her little remaining strength, Harleen squeezed her knees together, keeping him from forcing her legs apart. That didn’t seem to bother Loki; he simply swung both her legs over his left shoulder, holding them up high enough that her ass lifted off the bed and she lost any leverage she might have had left. Loki let go of her throat to roughly force her panties up along her legs, and she could feel him pressing urgently at her unguarded entrance.

Harleen wriggled frantically, and he couldn’t hold her still long enough to force his way in. “Submit to your lord!” he ordered, backhanding her across the face.

Harleen’s only response was to fight back harder. Loki roared wordlessly and slammed his hand back down around her throat, and the world went blurry, and then black.

She could only have been out for a second or two, but that was all the time Loki needed. When the stars faded from Harleen’s vision, he had her panties on the ground and her legs spread wide, and she woke up just in time to feel his full length sliding deep inside her. She couldn’t help the long moan of pleasure that escaped her lips, a visceral reaction to an itch that hadn’t been scratched for so long.

The sound seemed to please and encourage Loki, and he forced one hand up underneath her nightshirt to seize her bare breast and tease its hardening nipple. Between her disorientation from blacking out and the instinctive gratification of a good fucking, it took Harleen a few seconds to remember to resist, and Loki took full advantage of it, driving into her again and again while he explored under her shirt.

When Harleen fully came back to herself, she slapped him hard across the face. Loki jerked back with a snarl and tried to grab her hand, but she dodged him and clawed her fingers across his bare chest. ( _ Where did his clothes go?  _ A brief, distracted thought, immediately discarded as dream logic in favor of the more urgent present.) Harleen was pleased to see she drew a few dark drops of blood, and Loki retaliated by backhanding her again and pounding harder and faster.

He made a second grab for her hands and she dodged again. Too slow -- he caught her and pinned both her slender wrists under one hand up above her head. Harleen responded by jerking her whole body upwards and headbutting Loki right in the nose.  _ Ow. That was stupid. Why did I do that?  _ It hurt like hell, but it managed to surprise the Asgardian enough to give her a momentary advantage.

Flinging all of her weight to one side, Harleen managed to roll both of them off the bed, Loki’s back slamming into the ground with a satisfactory  _ thud _ . Hands free now, Harleen socked him in the right eye as hard as she could and pushed up off of him, running for the nearest exist.

Not fast enough. Loki caught her by the ankle and jerked her unceremoniously backwards, forcing her to fall into a painful faceplant. Harleen scrambled back up to her hands and knees, but he was already on her, and pushed his way roughly back into her again from behind, forcing her to stay on all fours. Oh, god, that felt so… No. It didn’t matter how it felt. All that mattered was getting away.

Loki pulled her head up and backwards with another fistfull of hair. Harleen whimpered in pain, and realized that wasn’t the only sound she was making; she’d been panting and mewling with every thrust, doing all but begging him for more. It was humiliating and undignified, but Harleen couldn’t stop. She’d always had a thing for rough sex, and, no matter how far she’d pushed it down, there was a tiny part of her that hadn’t looked at Loki the same way since she’d dreamed their little tango. This might not be how she usually had wet dreams, but she’d be lying to herself if she denied that dreaming something along these lines was inevitable.

_ Why not just go with it? _ a quiet voice asked at the back of her mind.  _ It’s just a dream, after all. There’s no shame in enjoying it. _

But, no. Dream or not, Harleen Quinzel had her goddamn principles, and she would. Not. Give. In.

Flattening herself to the ground, Harleen slipped off Loki and crawled out from under him, flipping over into an absurd sort of crab-walk to get away faster. It was a valiant effort, but she already knew it would be pointless. He caught her the same way he had last time, grabbing her ankle to pull her back under his control. He was breathing hard, his nose slowly dripping blood over a manic grin, and the skin darkening around his eye where she’d punched him.

“I never knew mortal women could be so much  _ fun! _ ” he gasped, straddling her. “I owe my brother an apology.”

Harleen tried to shove him off, but she was breathing even harder than he was, and her energy was all but spent. Loki ignored her feeble push, and brushed the hair back from her face. “You’ve done well, my kitten,” he said fondly, then abruptly held her nose shut. The moment Harleen opened her mouth to gasp for air, he shoved his tip inside it. Harleen had the brief, wild idea to bite down, but he was already coming, his hot liquid shooting into the back of her throat.

Harleen jerked spasmodically, but Loki stroked her bared throat like she was some wild animal refusing to take its medicine, and she reflexively swallowed, choking and gasping as he finished. Exhaustion made her go limp, and she felt a warm wetness spreading down between her thighs. The world went blurry again, but she didn’t lose consciousness completely.

Dimly, she realized Loki had picked her up and was carrying her back towards the bed. Harleen was so, so tired, and his ice-cold body felt so good on her overheated skin. She curled into him, pressing her face against his naked chest and letting the cool relief wash over her. At the same time, she beat his stomach with a sleepy fist, one last weak punch to prove what she thought of him.

“This doesn’t mean I’ve forgiven you,” she mumbled, or possibly just thought. Either way, Loki chuckled as he lowered her into bed and brushed icy lips across her forehead. Harleen’s eyes were already closed, but she could sense the sudden change of lighting as the god of mischief disappeared, taking the sun-filled penthouse and the doomed New York with him.


	6. Chapter 6

_ Beep. Beep. Beep. _

Well, at least she hadn’t missed the alarm this time. Harleen woke up drenched in sweat, her hair matted into knots despite the braids, and her blankets kicked around in a hopeless tangle. She pulled up the collar of her jersey, sniffed inside it gingerly, and made a face.  _ Gross. _ One of the more disgusting disadvantages to being an active sleeper. She made more of a face when she moved her legs and felt cold, wet fabric pressing in on her crotch. Clearly, sweat wasn’t the only thing drenching her panties.  _ Thanks, brain. Really needed that today. Now I’m stressed, tired,  _ and _ horny. _

One of the things Harleen hated most about nightmares was how difficult it was to shake off the sense of impending doom, even after waking. She had a sense of being watched prickling constantly on the back of her neck, and a grim foreboding feeling in her chest. The first thing she did after taking her shower (for once grateful for the facility's perpetual lack of enough hot water in the mornings) was log into S.H.I.E.L.D.’s artifact base and verify the Chitauri scepter was still under lock and key. A quick dig into a few more databases confirmed that the Avengers were alive, well, and not up to anything particularly interesting as far as S.H.I.E.L.D. could gather.

_ See?  _ she told herself.  _ You can relax now. The big, bad dream’s gone bye-bye. _

But the uneasiness followed Harleen as she pulled her hair up, got dressed, and went about her day as well as she could, distracted, and jumpy, and constantly questioning her vision, which was proving as unreliable as ever and had been joined by occasional auditory hallucinations, giggles and whispers in her own voice, calling her name as if from far away or through a bad radio connection.

One of her first errands took her to the dispensary to sign off on a confirmation of Simpson’s medication changes. She was left unattended for a few minutes when the chemist went to go sort out a SNAFU with one of the new patients’ chart -- not technically allowed, but she was a familiar and trusted face in the office -- and Harleen found herself almost tempted to pocket a bottle of mood stabilizers, just in case she needed to self-medicate later.

She resisted the urge, deciding she wasn’t quite  _ that _ desperate yet, but it was a dangerously close call. It was getting harder and harder to deny that she was spiraling in on a breaking point if she didn’t watch herself.

And so, Harleen watched herself. Every word, every action, every stray thought that crossed her mind, she examined and re-examined and stuffed into mental pigeonholes of “crazy” and “not crazy” before letting it take hold. Dr. Harleen Quinzel was definitely, positively, absolutely Not Crazy. Never had been, never would be. She’d made sure of that before, and she could do it again.

Just to be on the safe side, though, she shot off a quick email to her supervisor, asking about some rumors of a psychiatric position opening up in the Fridge. It was a smaller facility where she’d have more autonomy, not to mention a nice little pay bump -- effectively a promotion in all but title. She didn’t really  _ want _ to give up Loki’s case before she’d even made real progress with it, but something clearly had to be done. If that’s what it took to restabilize, so be it.

 

In the afternoon, Harleen had another Loki appointment. She tapped at her notepad with the point of her pen as she waited for him to arrive, constantly readjusting her posture in failed attempts to sit more comfortably. When he came in, she searched his face for any evidence of a black eye or broken nose, and let out the breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding when he looked the same as he always did.

He noticed her intense scrutiny and eyed her back as the guards left, raising an eyebrow.

“Something the matter, Dr. Quinzel?”

“No,” she replied shortly. She was in no mood for their usual banter today.

“Are you quite certain?” Loki asked innocently. “You  _ are _ looking a bit peaky. Some mortal ailment going around, perhaps?”

“I am in perfect health, thank you, Mr. L,” she snapped back tartly. “We are here to discuss  _ you _ , not me, so let’s concentrate, if you please. Now, I know we’ve been focusing on your early adolescence recently, but I’d like to skip forward a bit today. Tell me about the Battle of New York.” Harleen looked up from the notepad to stare the god down, watching him carefully to see how he responded.

“The Battle of…?” Loki looked perplexed for a moment, then brightened. “Oh! You mean that little kerfuffle with my brother and his friends?”

“Why yes, Mr. L. That ‘little kerfuffle’ is the reason you’re here, after all. You must have known we’d be discussing it eventually.” Harleen caught herself clicking her pen repeatedly, and forced herself to stop. “Your records indicate that your attempt to summon an alien army into New York City --”

“Point of order, Dr. Quinzel,” Loki interrupted languidly. “I  _ did _ summon an alien army into the city you call New York.”

Harleen glowered at him, but managed to refrain from rolling her eyes. “-- that your  _ initially successful, but ultimately countered  _ attempt to summon an alien army into New York City was intended to be merely the first major strike in a worldwide effort to subjugate the human race. Is that accurate?”

“My, but you’re testy today, Doctor,” he commented, rather than answer her question. “Are you sure you’re well?”

“Answer the question, please, Mr. L.”

Loki narrowed her eyes at her. “I’ve said it before,” he said quietly. “Your species was  _ made  _ to be subjugated. I’m doing humanity a favor, filling the vacuum you’ve struggled with for so long. All your little lives so brief, so wasted, with no one to focus you, set you toward a purer purpose. You may lack the perspective to fully understand, but I am helping you. All of you.”

“You mean, you  _ were _ helping us, as you see it,” Harleen clarified carefully, ignoring the goosebumps washing down the backs of her arms. “Prior to the aforementioned defeat.”

Loki shrugged, suddenly laconic. “Was. Am. Will. It makes no difference.”

“So, you intend another attempt?” Harleen concentrated on taking her notes, outlining every letter very slowly, very conscious of his eyes on her, but determined not to look up at him. She wasn’t sure she wanted to see whatever was in his eyes.

“My dear Harleen,” he hissed coolly. Harleen stiffened, and her pen froze mid-stroke. It was the first time that Loki -- the  _ real _ Loki -- had ever used her first name. He enunciated it just like his dream version had, and she struggled to work out if he really was the real Loki, or if she were dreaming again. “Do you genuinely believe I’d still be playing along with this little farce if there weren’t a larger victory to be had?”

Harleen involuntarily glanced toward him, and her eyesight began playing tricks on her again. For just a split second, gone before she could even blink, Loki was in his full godly regalia, horned helmet sweeping up and back toward the ceiling. Then, the vision vanished, and he was in the same uniform as ever. Harleen swallowed, making sure her voice was steady before she spoke.

“Mr. L, you’re hardly the first megalomaniac I’ve had sitting in that chair, insisting that his ongoing presence here is all part of some grand plot, and I very sincerely doubt you’ll be the last,” she said crisply. “Would you like to turn our discussion towards your delusions of grandeur, or shall we continue on the subject of New York?”

“How many?” he asked, ignoring the question.

Harleen blinked at him, startled. “I’m sorry?”

“How many others to come? You seem very confident that there will be others. How many ‘megalomaniacs’ will sit in this chair across from you, and tell you about their grand plots and dire schemes, Dr. Quinzel?” Apparently, he was feeling talkative again. Harleen recognized his tone and could tell he was winding himself up for another one of his soliloquies. At least he wasn’t calling her ‘Harleen’ anymore; that was comforting.

“How many patients, how many subjects, how many villains will parade through this room, letting you spend your time unraveling their heads, rather than facing what’s in your own? How many of their lives will you examine vicariously, sooner than begin your own life?” He was resting his chin is his hands -- an unusually human posture, for what she’d come to expect from him -- as he stared intently at her. Rather than menacing or vicious, he seemed oddly… curious. Fascinated. Like Harleen was a microorganism under a lens, behaving atypically, ignoring its evolutionary imperative in defiance of all logic and reason.

“I know why I’m here,” he pondered, more like he was thinking aloud than expecting any response from her. “But why you? What did you see inside yourself that drove you far below the surface of the earth, locked into this box of cement and iron? What are you so desperate to contain, little doctor, that you’re throwing your entire self into burying it beneath tons of rock and dirt and other people’s broken psyches?”

“It’s not about…” Harleen almost began to explain all the reasons she usually gave when somebody questioned her -- admittedly abnormal -- career choice: the prestigious position, the competitive entry process, the opportunities it would offer, its relevance to her dissertation, the job security, how being underground never bothered her (better that than being too far above the ground, anyway), and neither did the subjects, how it was perfectly safe, how well it paid -- not that she had any opportunity to spend her well-gotten gains, but that just meant more savings for retirement… She had a list of rationalizations a mile long, and was far too accustomed to having to deliver it.

Then she shut her mouth abruptly. What the hell did she think she was doing, trying to explain her life to Loki? She didn’t have to justify herself to him! Her choices were her own goddamn business!

“Nice try, Mr. L,” she snapped coldly at him. “I think that’s all the time we have for today. Same time Thursday?”

“Oh, I don’t know about Thursday,” he quipped. “Really busy schedule, you know how it is, lots to be done. Not sure I’ll be able to fit you in.”

Harleen narrowed her eyes at him, unamused, as the guards entered and escorted him out to drop him back into his cell until Thursday. He was watching her as he left, snickering at his own sense of humor the whole way.

Harleen stayed in her chair for ten minutes after he was gone, pretending to finish her notes for the sake of any unlikely observers in the other room.

She’d reassured herself that last night’s nightmare was just that -- not that she’d needed it, but it was nice to see he looked the same as ever. She’d gotten confirmation of his intent to pursue further malevolence against humanity -- the Powers-That-Be would be deeply pleased to have that on formal record. She’d  _ almost _ fallen for his ploy to get more personal information out of her, but had headed that off at the pass -- well done, her. She should be pleased with today’s results.

So why did she feel so much like he’d won a decisive match in a game she didn’t know they’d been playing?


	7. Chapter 7

Thursday morning didn’t start off any more auspiciously than any of her other mornings. Exhausted from fitful sleep, and not enough of it, hungry from forgotten meals, cranky from bad dreams and spots in her eyes, perpetually worried and anxious, Harleen dragged herself grudgingly through her morning routine, and stopped in front of her full-length mirror for a pep talk and careful examination before she left her quarters for the day.

Clothes? Matching, clean, right-side-out, on frontwards. They hung a little loosely on her -- she’d been losing weight lately.  _ One of the silver linings to slowly losing your mind. _ Hair? Pulled back tight, not a strand out of place. Make-up? Flawless, as ever. Shoes? On the right feet. Only need to make that mistake once a week, tops. Game face? Harleen tried for her customer service smile, and it came out in a sarcastic grimace. She stuck her tongue out, scrunched her nose, crossed her eyes, and then tried the smile again.  _ There _ . Perfect.

Harleen dropped the smile to stare seriously back into her own reflection. “Don’t fuck up, Harley” she said aloud. There. That was enough pep for one talk.

With a resigned sigh, Harleen put the smile back on and left for the cafeteria, careful to make sure there was exactly the right amount of bounce in her step.

 

Loki’s appointment wasn’t until much later in the afternoon, so she busied herself with other patients after breakfast, trying to ignore the building tension. There was an odd dread commingled with the usual anticipation that preceded a visit with Loki -- odd in that it didn’t  _ reduce _ her eagerness, merely… complicated it, somehow. Just one more oddness among many others.

Still, it did nothing to help the tightness in her chest or the snappishness of her temper. She felt like she was still in elementary school, waiting to deliver her first class presentation, putting off getting called on while still wanting to get it over with as fast as possible.

Frustratingly, all the tension amounted to nothing. There was yet another lockdown -- so frequent now that even the freshest of fresh meat could barely move themselves to whisper nervously to each other when it happened -- that began about fifteen minutes before the Loki appointment and lasted well past its end.

Harleen managed to be caught without her bag for this one, so had absolutely nothing to occupy herself with as she paced around the convergence point she’d been trapped in, this one a small, unused office off the R&D corridor, muttering stormily about lost time.

“Bored?” asked the sole other occupant of the office. Harleen whirled on him, glaring through the flashing red lights.  _ Take the ‘caged animal’ routine down a notch, Harley,  _ she reminded herself,  _ before you actually do bite his head off. _

Dr. Marven had claimed the office’s only chair, and was sitting at his ease -- well, as easily as he ever sat with the iron rod up his ass -- as he observed her pacing. Of all the people she had to be stuck in here with… Harleen had honestly almost forgotten about their little rivalry, she’d been so absorbed in Loki’s case, but Dr. Marven clearly hadn’t.

“Don’t tell me you’re not pissed off about all these interruptions, too,” she said, forcing her shoulders to unknot with tremendous effort.

“Of course I am,” he replied stiffly. “You’re not the only one with important patients, you know.” Harleen was far too tired and cranky for her usual chipper mask, and rolled her eyes openly. He furrowed his eyebrows, offended. “Well, you’re not.”

“I never said that I was,” she snapped at him.

They sat in stony silence for a few minutes, Harleen leaning against a blank whiteboard with her arms folded tightly across her chest, both of them looking in pointedly opposite directions.

“Heard you’re past your third anticipated timeline with him,” Dr. Marven said innocently. He didn’t need to specify whom. “Doesn’t look like you’re on track for the fourth, either.”

Harleen’s hands tightened into fists, and she took several seconds to force them to relax before she responded. “We’re making progress,” she ground out between her teeth. “Good results take time. Not that I’d expect  _ you _ to know anything about that,” she added spitefully. “I’m so sorry that  _ my way _ doesn’t actually end up killing anybody!”

It was a below-the-belt jab. Marven was all right at his job, but prone to impatience. On more than one occasion, he’d ended up going just a little too far, pushing just a little too hard to get results on the timeframe he wanted -- most disastrously, he’d once been assigned to a patient who had left poison traps across half of Chicago, and with orders to extract the locations of the unfound traps from her. Instead, he’d accidentally gone full  _ tabula rasa  _ and left her with no memory of where Chicago even was, much less of where the traps were hidden.

Office politics were the only reason he hadn’t been fired on the spot. Three people had died, and eighteen more hospitalized, but at least he’d been spending his valuable time  _ networking _ and  _ making the right connections _ so he could scrape his way back out of the mess _.  _ Harleen knew full well the deaths haunted him on top of the sting of professional failure, but, hey, he’d started it.

“That was uncalled for, Quinzel,” he said loudly, pushing the chair back and rising to his feet.

“Yeah?” she asked, pushing back up away from the whiteboard and squaring off with him. She could feel an incipient shouting match in the air, and she needed a good fight. He must have been tense too, because it usually took a lot more taunting to get him to this point. “I don’t remember being the one to bring up difficult patients.”

“You always go a step too far, and then act like nothing can touch you,” he accused. “Do you think anyone really buys your Little Miss Perfect routine? Rushing around here from one patient to another, like you’re so much better than the rest of us, like the whole place would fall apart without you there to hold it together!”

“Wouldn’t it?!” Harleen demanded. “I can’t help it that you take it  _ so _ personally that I actually  _ care  _ about doing my job well! Maybe I wouldn’t have as much rushing around to do if you spent more time with your own patients, and less starting petty competitions.”

“ _ Petty? _ ” he roared. “I spent  _ years _ working my ass off to get a case like Loki’s, and then  _ you  _ come along, and --”

“And work my  _ own _ ass off, and  _ earn _ it out from under you, is that it?” she fired back, stepping closer to yell in his face as well as she could with their height differential. “Maybe that’s not how it worked at San Jose State or wherever --”

“ _ STANFORD!” _

“Exactly! You’re  _ so _ fucking wrapped up in academic achievements, and honors, and titles, and you’ve been riding it ever since, like anyone here cares jack-fucking-shit what school you went to! Did it ever occur to you, Marven, that you’re not the  _ only _ one to have worked his ass off to be here? The only difference is that  _ I _ never fucking  _ stopped _ , and that’s why I’m  _ always  _ going to be better than you!”

“ _ Better  _ than me?!” he yelled. “You unbelievably stuck-up b--”

“Yes, I  _ AM  _ goddamn better than you, and you know it! Let’s not lie to ourselves, Marven. The  _ only _ reason we’re at remotely the same level is because you’re such an insufferable kiss-ass, and who the hell do you think picks up your slack?”

He was already shouting something else over her, and she shouted right back without listening to whatever he was saying. This was probably her favorite part of a good, cathartic fight: no structure, no filters, just each party airing what they thought of the other, safe in the knowledge that the other party couldn’t hear them over their own voice anyway. It was really second only to sex for burning off a bad mood.

The same feeling must have occurred to Marven, because the next thing she knew, his mouth came down on hers, cutting her off mid-shout, and he pushed her back against the whiteboard, kissing her hungrily.

Harleen gave as good as she got, tangling her fingers in his hair to pull his head closer to hers, and wrapping her legs around his waist when he hoisted her up and pivoted her onto the bare desk. They broke off the kiss just long enough to frantically remove their lab coats before diving back into each other, Harleen exploring his mouth with her tongue while he undid the first few buttons on her blouse to run his hand over her bra and squeeze hard.

He had just gotten his other hand under her skirt to probe eagerly at her damp panties when the all-clear tones buzzed through the corridors and the red lights stopped flashing in the office. Harleen froze halfway through unfastening his belt.

“Come on,” he whispered urgently. “We have time.”

“No… no,” Harleen decided firmly, sliding back on the desk and pushing his hand out so she could close her knees. “This was a mistake.”

Dr. Marven looked wounded, but he found her lab coat and handed it to her. “I’ve been wanting you for weeks,” he confessed  while she buttoned her blouse back up.

“Oh?” she asked, a bit awkwardly. She couldn’t have said the same; this was more of a spur-of-the-moment thing for her. Call it temporary insanity.

“There’s just been something about you lately that…” Dr. Marven trailed off, apparently at a loss for words. “Can we… do this again sometime? Maybe sit together for dinner tomorrow? I promise not to bring up work.” He tried for a smile, but it didn’t work very well. Some faces were just made for serious expressions.

“I, um…” Harleen stalled for time by clenching a bobby pin between her teeth while she re-did her hair, but that only gave her a few seconds reprieve. “We really shouldn’t have done it this time,” she pointed out, trying for as neutral a rejection as possible. “Conflict of interest and all that, right?”

His eyebrows knitted together in the middle. “There’s someone else, isn’t there?”

Harleen paused midway through tucking her blouse back in to raise a quizzical eyebrow at him. “Really?” she asked. “ _ That’s _ your first go-to?”

The question hit oddly close to home, though, and she couldn’t at first figure out why. Who else  _ would  _ there be? Her research assistant was more like a little brother to her. She passed dozens of miscellaneous guards and agents in the halls without ever sharing the time of day. She was on first-name terms with most of the dispensary staff, but never spent long in their company. There  _ were _ the many rumors about her and various higher-ups, but those were laughable; she couldn’t even pinpoint the last time she’d seen her direct supervisor in person, much less anyone higher in the food chain.

_ The foundation has been laid, and in due time, you will belong to me, mind, body, and soul. _

It was unusual that she remembered the exact dialogue of any dream she had, and more unusual still that the words should occur to her now. What was she thinking? That she owed any loyalty to a figment of her own subconscious, modeled after a madman? She snorted at herself. Chris would probably assume she was snorting at him, but she didn’t feel inclined to disabuse him of that notion.

“This was fun, and we clearly both needed it,” she said briskly, stepping past him to open the door. “But it’s just as well it didn’t go anywhere. You’re still an ass, Dr. Marven. Our entire working relationship is founded on mutual loathing. There doesn’t need to be someone else for me to have more self-respect than  _ that _ .”

For the second time in as many encounters with him, she gave herself the last word, leaving the office without giving him the chance to reply. Harleen didn’t revel in the victory as she normally might have, though. She was distracted, thinking again about the dream, all of the dreams. Sure, they were fucked-up, but in a way, she was almost looking forward to the next one. The facility was starting to feel more suffocating and pointless by the day, and the scenes her subconscious gave her at night more rich and vivid and  _ real _ by contrast.

They were beginning to feel like her only escape.


	8. Chapter 8

Harleen skipped dinner that evening. She thought about detouring by the cafeteria on the way back to her quarters, but it just didn’t seem worth it somehow. Her glorified little dorm room wasn’t much of a personal oasis, but it was the closest she was going to get for a long time.

Normally, Harleen would want to be alone after a day like this, but right now, that was the last thing she wanted. At the same time, though, there wasn’t anybody in particular she wanted to be around, and the thought of surrounding herself with strangers in one of the personnel recreation areas just felt claustrophobic.

Instead, she hurried back to her quarters and collapsed onto her desk chair, spinning gloomily back and forth and staring at her laptop before blowing her bangs out of her face with a resigned puff of air and opening the proprietary app S.H.I.E.L.D. had installed for personal communication. Phones were very much  _ machina non grata _ , even if they could get a signal down here, which Harleen very much doubted.

After the connection icon blipped a few times, her screen filled with stucco ceiling and half a light fixture at an askew angle. “Sweetie! You didn’t tell me you were in the City!”

“Huh?” Harleen blinked at the ceiling in front of her, then said, “You’ve got your camera backwards, Mom. Flip it into selfie mode.”

“The thingy on the screen said you were calling from New York.” The camera rotated around, giving Harleen a dizzyingly laggy carousel of the dining room before settling on her mother’s left eye, which was fixed somewhere off-camera. “Oh, but now I can’t see your pretty face,” she pouted.

At least that made it safe for Harleen to briefly facepalm. “That’s probably just the IP address it happened to generate; it doesn’t mean I’m actually there. Look at the screen again, and hit that little icon that looks like a portrait. That way, we can see each other at the same time.”

“So you’re not coming to visit your poor, lonely mother? And here I was hoping you were finally bringing home a nice boy for me to meet.” As the elder Dr. Quinzel got her phone sorted out, Harleen briefly considered explaining proxies and VPNs again, and decided it was better for both of them if she didn’t.

“It’s good to see you too, Mom. So glad you’re doing well. I’m also great, thanks for asking.”

“Oh, hush. You know I care. I just worry you spend too much time by yourself, wherever you are. I know you’re a strong, independent woman and everything, but I think you underestimate how nice it is to have a good man you can share the burden with. Or a good woman!” she added hastily. “It’s 2012; you do you. I just want to see you happy, sweetheart.”

“Of course I’m happy, Mom.” Harleen smiled placatingly at her computer to prove it. Fortunately for her, the connection was too jumpy for her mother to get a clear view of the smile -- the woman had an uncanny way with reading faces. Just in case, she hurried the conversation on. “I got that big assignment I was telling you about last time.”

“Ooooh? Anyone I’d have heard of?”

“You know full well I can’t tell you that.”

Dr. Quinzel heaved a great sigh. “I understand. You want to keep your poor, old mother in the dark. She clearly can’t be trusted with the  _ good _ gossip.”

“Yeah, I have this weird thing where I don’t like being fired from my dream job, jailed for treason, and eventually executed,” Harleen said, rolling her eyes openly. “Just one of my personal pet peeves.”

“You’ve always been unreasonable that way,” her mother scoffed, blowing a raspberry at the screen. Harleen smiled more genuinely, glad that she’d called. “Can you at least tell me if the big, mysterious assignment’s been going well?”

Harleen opened her mouth and paused, not sure of the answer. “Sort of?” she finally offered, with an awkward shrug. “It’s… complicated. It’s not going  _ badly _ , but beyond that, I’m not really sure  _ where _ it’s going. I think I’m making progress, though, but hopefully it won’t really matter. I’m waiting to hear back on a new opportunity.”

“So soon?” Dr. Quinzel asked. “But you were so excited to start whatever it is you’re working on now!”

“I was! I am,” Harleen assured her. “I’m… really, really enjoying the project, actually,” she added slowly. “I’d be… genuinely disappointed to say goodbye to it. But… I don’t know… It’s…”

“Complicated, I know,” her mother sighed. “You sound like me when I was trying to decide between your father and this job offer I had out west.” Harleen flushed. “Lucky for you I ended up choosing him, isn’t it?”

“How  _ is _ Dad doing?” Harleen asked quickly.

“Oh, please!” Her mother snorted. “Don’t ask me about that man; I don’t want to talk about him. Did you hear he’s got himself another girlfriend? This one’s even younger than Bunny or Kitty or whatever the last one’s name was.”

In spite of her insistence that she didn’t want to talk about it, Dr. Quinzel was immediately and thoroughly absorbed in the subject of her ex-husband’s love life, as Harleen had known she would be.

She half-listened contentedly until her mother caught her mid-yawn and promptly scolded her for not getting enough sleep or eating well. Harleen’s protests that she was doing both fell on deaf ears and she was sent off to bed with threats of being force-fed the next time she bothered to visit her poor, lonely mother, if Hell didn’t freeze over first.

Just before shutting down for the night, she double-checked her inbox one last time, and eagerly opened the reply she’d been waiting days for.

Yes, the rumors were true. No, she was not being considered for the opportunity at this time. Though her work was exemplary, many factors were… blah, blah, blah. Too much time doing her actual job, and not enough time spent on office politics was basically what it came down to. Harleen slammed the laptop angrily shut and threw herself into bed.

 

Sleep was a long time coming, and barely stuck around when it finally did. Harleen could have sworn she only closed her eyes for a second, but when she opened them, the red emergency lights were flashing again.

There was no alarm, though, which was strange. The klaxons usually only wailed for the first few minutes of a red alert, but it would be impossible for the  _ dead _ to sleep through them, much less someone as light a sleeper as Harleen had been recently.

Harleen was tempted to pull the blankets over her head and ignore it until morning, but she roused herself with a grumble and pulled a pair of faded jeans out of the back of a drawer to wear under her nightshirt; she almost never wore jeans at the facility -- wasn’t even sure why she’d packed them, really -- but fuck it. It was, what, two in the goddamn morning? If they were going to pull start pulling this shit at o’dark-thirty, they’d just have to get used to casual Fridays.

Her braids had fallen out again, so Harleen hastily finger-combed her hair into pigtails, not even bothering to braid it up again, before stifling a yawn and stepping barefoot out into the corridor. She rubbed her eyes with the back of one hand, then looked around and stopped dead in her tracks.

The residential corridor was a scene of carnage out of the goriest B-movie ever to have blown its entire budget on fake blood and dummy corpses.

Blood coated the walls in drips and splatters and occasional scrawls of half-finished warnings. It sat in half-congealed pools along the hall at irregular intervals or in long, scuffed trails that ended at the feet of now-dead figures, passing acquaintances or half-familiar coworkers whose names Harleen had never bothered to learn.

The whole bodies were relatively few, though, compared to the… parts scattered around the floor. Torn limbs, naked eyes, unidentifiable organs… Harleen choked and buried her nose in the crook of her elbow before she’d have to smell what she was sure would make any slaughterhouse smell like a field of daisies.

Nightmare. This had to be another nightmare. Just another stupid, fucked-up, traumatizing dream she’d be annoyed about in the morning.  _ Think it through, Harley. Some of that blood looks days old, and you have  _ not  _ been asleep for days. It’s just more dumb dream logic. _

A flicker of shadow darted suddenly in and out of view at one end of the long corridor. Fight-or-flight overrode her best attempts at rationalization, and Harleen was off and running in the opposite direction, dodging barefooted around the gore but otherwise paying no attention to which way she was going.

A random turn at an intersection brought her up short and she staggered to a halt in front of a grotesque pile of corpses stacked all the way up to the ceiling. Retching, she turned and took the opposite route, only to catch site of an enormous, hulking figure at the far end of that hall. It turned slowly towards her, lifting its head at an unnatural angle and rotating slightly, like it couldn’t see but was trying to hear or sniff her out.

Harleen sped off down the only remaining path, trying to ignore the growing stitch in her side and wishing she’d thought to put on a bra. She tried to listen to tell if the monster was following her -- what even was it? They didn’t have anything like  _ that _ down in the cells, did they? -- but couldn’t hear anything over her own heartbeat and the slam of her feet on the concrete floor, and didn’t dare stop to turn around and look.

On she ran, taking any way open to her, though many were blocked by the dead or by makeshift barricades that clearly hadn’t helped anyone. Sometimes it felt like she was running in circles, sure that she’d seen some particular mutilated corpse or pile of thumbs before, but maybe the gruesome scenes were just blending into each other. The still-flashing lights washing everything in red didn’t help.

She saw other monsters as she ran, clutching the no-longer-ignorable cramp at her side. Some were hulking and grotesque, like the first, others eerie and spindly, still others simply shadows with great glowing eyes. Fortunately, they were all far from her, and she saw them before they saw her, able to adjust her route to avoid them and keep picking out a path through the facility.

Finally, she ended up in a dead end. It was inevitable, she thought angrily, running randomly, reactively like that. Should have paid attention to where she was going.  _ Stupid, stupid, stupid. _

Most of the doors on this short section of hall looked like they went to offices or conference rooms -- more dead ends -- but there was one at the far end that looked promising. It had a biometrics panel by the handle, and those usually opened up onto different wings of the facility. Maybe the whatever-they-weres hadn’t even gotten to that section at all.

Leaping over a facedown body in the middle of the floor, Harleen dashed to the door and held her palm to the scanner to unlock it, hoping and praying she had authorized access to whatever was behind the door. There were very few signs or labels in the facility; either you knew where you were going, or you had no business being there.

“TOO FAST - PLEASE REMAIN STILL UNTIL SCAN IS COMPLETE” the panel blinked at her in glowing letters.

Harleen swore, wiped her sweaty palm on her jeans, and risked a glance over her shoulder at the corridor behind her. Empty, for the moment. She forced herself to take a few slow, deep breaths to try and get her hands to stop shaking before she reached out to try again.

Hand halfway to the panel, she stopped abruptly. The moment of stillness had given her brain a chance to fight past the panic, and a few suddenly-obvious facts finally put themselves together in her head. Everything finally clicked into place.

Harleen took another deep breath and slowly, deliberately, turned her back on the door and looked back down the blood-spattered corridor. Still empty, except for the anonymous dead body.

“You could have just asked nicely, you know,” she called into the still air, trying unsuccessfully to keep the shakes out of her voice and crossing her arms in a display of false bravado.

There was no puff of smoke or Cheshire Cat fade-in or any other kind of special effects. One moment, she was alone in the world; the next, Loki was casually leaning against the wall right next to the door, not six inches from her. Harleen couldn’t help squeaking and jumping backwards, the heel of one foot landing in the nearest puddle of blood, but she was no longer surprised to find she felt nothing but dry concrete underneath it.

“What gave me away?” Loki asked with a sunny smile, as though he’d been caught in a harmless little office prank, rather than a weeks-long campaign to systematically torture her.


	9. Chapter 9

Harleen eyed Loki warily, keeping one hand on the wall to steady herself and trying to be a little less obvious about how hard she was still breathing. “There were a lot of small things that only made sense once I put them all together,” she said. Her voice was slightly less shaky now, but she noticed absently that her dialect was creeping back in, as it occasionally did when she was scared or upset.

“It finally clicked when I realized I’d been…” she paused, selecting the right word carefully. “...herded here. Someone wanted me in this hall, at this door, to open it for them. It didn’t take a genius from there to work out the one person who would want to get somewhere he wouldn’t be able to go on his own, who would single me out specifically to get there, and who would have the ability to make…  _ this _ happen.”

She gestured around at the carnage. “Can you cut it out, by the way? It’s just the  _ teensiest _ bit distracting.”

Loki dismissed the illusions with a lazy flick of his fingers, and the blood and bodies vanished along with the red lights. The corridor was a mundane gray again, lit only by the tracks of auxiliary lighting lining the edges of the floor and every doorframe.

“That collar doesn’t do jackshit, does it?” she asked, indicating the slender chain still around his throat.

“It gives me a mild headache when I create my illusions, but little more,” he confessed modestly. “Terribly irritating at times, as I’m sure you’ll be pleased to note.”

“Very,” she growled. Anything that caused Loki even trivial pain after all he’d put her through was fine by her.

He laughed. It was a surprisingly open, cheerful laugh, and Harleen realized he was still having fun. Being caught in the act didn’t seem to have dampened his spirit in the least.

“I should have worked it out a long time ago,” she continued, half to herself. “It’s obvious, really, in retrospect.”

Loki looked rather offended. “I wouldn’t say  _ obvious _ ,” he objected in ruffled tones. “I’m really quite proud of that method. It’s fascinating how closely perception affects actuality, wouldn’t you agree, Doctor? Cause the subject to  _ believe _ they have lost contact with reality, and eventually the mere possibility of their own madness causes them to drive  _ themselves  _ into insanity with very little effort on one’s own part.  _ I _ would call it sheer elegance in its simplicity, but I suppose some who fail to appreciate its subtlety might refer to it as ‘ _ obvious _ .’”

Loki lifted his nose in exaggerated pique and Harleen folded her arms again, refusing to be impressed. “ _ So _ dreadfully sorry I have trouble appreciating your brilliant plan to drive me crazy. Was the horror show tonight part of your  _ elegant subtlety? _ ”

“Well, no,” he admitted, a bit awkwardly. “You were proving annoyingly resistant to my usual methods -- sleep deprivation, hallucinations, and so on -- and I’m on a bit of a schedule, so I had to… improvise a bit. You must admit it  _ almost _ worked,” he added hastily. “With more time to go about things the proper way, I’m quite certain I’d have been successful.”

Loki tilted his head at Harleen, giving her that fascinated scientist-at-a-microscope look, and Harleen was suddenly struck by how much he sounded like  _ her _ talking about  _ his _ case. The parallel was almost absurd, really.

“Why  _ are _ you still sound?” he asked, seeming genuinely curious. “I’ve lured stronger minds than yours into true madness more quickly than it’s taken for you to become merely unsettled.”

Harleen paused before answering, ignoring the implied insult. She thought she knew the reason, but wasn’t sure how much to give away and how much to hold back. “I know what it feels like when my own brain betrays me,” she said finally, tightening her arms around herself. “This… this wasn’t it. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew it wasn’t just in my head.”

Loki kept eyeing her appraisingly for another long moment before simply saying, “Interesting,” and dropping the subject. “Now, on to business,” he said briskly, straightening up away from the wall and taking a step towards her and the door. “You recommended asking nicely, so I shall do so exactly once. Harley, will you please open this door for me?”

“No,” she snapped immediately. “Where did you hear that name?”

“You talk out loud to yourself when you think you’re alone,” Loki told her, sparing her a sideways glance from his study of the biometrics panel. “It’s rather endearing, actually; I don’t think you’re even aware of how much you do it, but the moment you close the door to your chambers, it’s nothing but, ‘Oh, great job, Harley. You didn’t sound like an idiot in that meeting at  _ all, _ ’ this and, ‘Harley, where did you leave your goddamn hairbrush this time?’ that.”

“My voice is  _ not _ that squeaky,” Harleen protested.

Loki shrugged laconically and turned back to the panel. “If you say so,” he said in that way that made it clear he disagreed but didn’t find it worth arguing about. It looked like he was trying unsuccessfully to trick the door into opening for him. A series of different hands, including one Harleen recognized as her own, appeared at the end of his arm, but the biometrics panel just blinked a red LED at him with a  _ blip-blip  _ sound for each one and stayed locked.

With a disappointed sigh, Loki returned his full attention to Harleen. “Less nicely this time,” he said, taking another step closer. Harleen was suddenly reminded of the differences in their height as he loomed over her. He’d done one of his rapid switches, this time from fussy and preening to quietly menacing. “Open the door.”

“How do you know it will even open for me, anyhow?” she asked. “I don’t have access  _ everywhere _ down here, you know.”

Loki raised an eyebrow at her. “Do you think so little of me that you’d believe I would go to all this trouble without verifying that very detail? Open the door.”

“What’s even in there?” Harleen pressed.

Loki bent his head down so it was level with hers. “You’re stalling, Dr. Quinzel, and doing it badly,” he hissed into her ear. “Open the door.”

Harleen’s breath caught in her throat as a wave of goosebumps rushed over her skin where his breath touched her, and she looked right into his eyes inches from hers. “Make me,” she challenged him.

“I could,” he growled. Without warning, he had her wrist locked in an iron grip and forced her hand down until it hovered just next to the security panel.

“You could,” she admitted, not breaking gaze with him. This close, she could see the faintest yellow traces of a nearly-healed bruise around his right eye. There was no point in him hiding it anymore, after all. She realized how shallowly she was breathing and forced herself to breath deeply again while she took a small gamble. “You won’t, though.”

“What makes you so sure?” he asked, increasing the pressure on her wrist. It was beginning to hurt, but only a little.

“Because it’s no fun that way,” she said quickly. She was guessing, but it was a pretty confident guess. The months they’d spent talking hadn’t been completely useless. “You  _ could _ force me, but it’s more fun to trick me or tempt me or talk me into it. If you resort to force to get what you want, you lose the game.” The gamble seemed to be finding its mark, so she took another breath and pressed her luck. “Like you did in your version of Stark Tower.”

It hit home. Loki’s eyes narrowed, and he released her wrist, which she rubbed gingerly behind her back. “That was… a lapse in patience,” he muttered, turning away to examine the door again.

“Oh, sure. Who hasn’t gotten impatient and rapey every now and then?” Harleen asked innocently. He didn’t respond, still turned stubbornly away from her. Harleen sidled a little closer to him. It might have been the minor victory of guessing right about his little games, or it might have been the aftereffects of the fear and adrenaline, but she was feeling oddly buoyant and decided to push a few more buttons, just for the fun of it. “So… are you gonna?”

He tried to ignore her. She could see it in the set of his shoulders. He was still cranky about being called out on losing his own little game, and didn’t want to acknowledge her presence, but curiosity got the better of him. “Am I going to what?”

Harleen shrugged. He wasn’t the only one who could pointedly fake insouciance. “Trick me. Tempt me. Talk me into it. Do that voodoo that you do so well. Your B-movie play didn’t pan out, but you can’t tell me you don’t have plans C, D, and E squirreled away somewhere in your head. What’s your next move?”

“Why don’t you tell me?” he asked, turning back to her. “What might you find tempting enough?”

Harleen involuntarily let her eyes slip up and down his body. She’d be lying to herself if she said she wasn’t a little blue-balled from her last encounter with Dr. Marven, and with that combined with her spike in energy and the memory of their fuck in her second “dream”… Rapey and non-consensual and Not Okay? Yes. Incredibly hot? Also yes. She was pretty all right with being a bad feminist if it meant she got another slice of that pie.

Sense reestablished itself for a brief moment. Was she actually considering this?

Nope.

She was considering something crazier.

“Three conditions,” she said before she could tell herself no.

Loki didn’t answer; he merely looked at her, waiting.

“First, tell me why you want to go in there.”

Loki continued to wait, staring impassively at her. When it was clear she wasn’t going to go on, he prompted, “And the second?”

“Nope. Not how this works,” she told him. “Tell me the first and you get to hear the second.”

Loki exhaled a short, irritable puff of air through his nose. Harleen could see him weighing pros and cons, but curiosity won out again. He wanted to know what else she’d consider valuable enough to help him almost as much as he wanted through the door.

“It’s storage,” he informed her. “Food and resources stockpiled against possible siege. A significant quantity, I believe, but nothing I could use to cause any great harm.”

“Not what I asked,” Harleen replied coolly. “Why do  _ you _ want in there?”

He gave her a little ‘can’t fault me for trying’ shrug and came clean. “There is also an exit concealed there, a direct route to the surface in the event a quiet and expedient retreat is necessary. It’s not documented in the facility directory, but you’re not my only source of information. The usefulness of this fortress has come to its end, and there is much else to be done. You and your people here will no longer be burdened by my presence.” Loki dropped her a flirtatious wink. “As much as I regret our parting, our paths are unlikely to meet again.”

Harleen nodded slowly. “I thought it might be something along those lines. It’s one of the only reasons I’d have access. Legally, all us civilian employees  _ have _ to have the ability to open the entrances and exits, even if we’re not allowed to or don’t even know they’re there. The Powers-That-Be aren’t super happy about it, but it’s  _ technically _ kidnapping otherwise, at least until they push their exception through legislation. Next question.”

“Yes?”

“What would have happened to me if I hadn’t figured it out?” she asked. She thought she knew the answer already, but she wanted to hear him admit it. “I open the door to get away from your shadow puppets; you follow before it closes and make your great escape. Then what? I ‘wake up’ alone in a warehouse with my palmprint on your getaway route, to be fired or arrested or worse and not even know why?”

Loki looked mildly startled. “I honestly hadn’t thought about it,” he acknowledged. “Something of that nature, I suppose. Does that offend you?”

“A little bit, yeah.” Harleen meant to say that sarcastically, but she realized as she spoke that it was a comparatively trivial offense. She knew Loki, probably better than any other Midgardian did, possibly even better than most Asgardians, and she hadn’t expected anything better from him. Really, she was lucky he hadn’t intended to kill her himself. “Third condition.”

“Not a question, then?”

“A condition.” Harleen took one more deep breath and plunged in. “I’m coming with you.”

Loki lifted both eyebrows at her. “You jest,” he accused.

“Do I look like a fucking jester?” Harleen demanded. She’d said it out loud now. She’d committed herself. No backsies. “If I help you get out, I want out. Fuck this place.”

“Your discontent was apparent, but I hadn’t realized the depth of your animosity for S.H.I.E.L.D.,” Loki observed, his tone carefully neutral.

“It’s not animosity. It’s…” Harleen struggled to find the words to explain. “Frustration. Boredom. It’s so… bureaucratic, so organized and disciplined. I spend half my day sitting two feet away from the infamous and the the notorious and the mind-bogglingly dangerous, and it’s just… so… goddamned  _ tedious _ .” She let it out in one great exhalation, finally having voiced her dissatisfaction aloud. Now that she’d started, she wasn’t sure she could stop.

“And I’m so fucking  _ exhausted _ . Your fun little sleep deprivation games, keeping me up half the night, every night, making me think I was dreaming and then wondering why I felt like I’d never slept, sure, that didn’t help, and  _ thanks _ for that, by the way, but it’s been an endemic problem since before then.”

Harleen realized belatedly that she was pacing back and forth in front of the door, her voice getting shriller, the Jersey in it coming back stronger than it had been since high school. “I have to fight 24/7 just to get the same amount of respect as idiots who coast by on family connections and generous donations and the right goddamn reproductive organs. Do you have  _ any _ idea how fucking frustrating it is to be the smartest and most competent person in the room and still have to fight for just a fraction of the attention going to someone who doesn’t deserve it?”

“Some idea, yes,” Loki agreed. There was an amused smirk playing around the corners of his mouth. Harleen rounded on him.

“And, for the record,  _ Mr. L, _ I don’t have any goddamn intention of lying down under the bus for you. You think the consequences of me letting you out will be any different just because I  _ know _ I’m doing it? I’m not going to wave a fucking hanky at you from the doorway and wish you  _ au revoir _ and best of fuckin’ luck, then sit down and wait for my handcuffs.

“So, the way I see it is…” Harleen turned on her heel and started pacing again, calmer now, but still speaking rapidly, the words scrambling to keep up with her brain as she thought out loud, walked him through her reasoning. “I got a couple choices. I could get out of here without you just fine, doing it the legit way. Maybe even turn you in, give the knuckleheads in Containment a heads-up that their little collar ain’t worth shit and let them develop you a new one, hopefully one that gives you at least a worse headache.”

Harleen paused in her pacing for a moment. Her bare feet were getting cold on the concrete floor, and she rubbed them on her jeans, one after the other, to warm them up before returning to the track she was slowly wearing in front of the door.

“Then I drop this bullshit and go learn marine biology or open an Etsy store or start a Ponzi scheme or what-the-fuck-ever, and let you play your little mind games on someone less fun. Maybe in a year or so, I’ll  _ finally _ be done with the paperwork and the patient transfers and the NDAs and the exit interviews, and I’ll get to go free, as long as I don’t mind S.H.I.E.L.D. tapping me on my shoulder every other month to make sure I’m not blabbing their secrets or to beg me to come back for  _ one last  _ case that simply  _ nobody else  _ can handle.”

She turned towards Loki with a contemptuous snort before resuming her pacing. “Probably yours, if I had to bet, the third or fourth time you land back in here and they finally realize what I’m worth.

“But…” Harleen twirled on one foot at the far end of her line to turn back in the other direction.  “I’ve always been a big fan of instant gratification. Besides, I’ve spent my entire adult life doing nothing but trying to get here, so what the fuck else would I even do with myself? I’ve spent way too long being grown-up and responsible, and I’m feeling real fucking impulsive right now. Soooo...”

She finally skipped to a complete stop directly in front of Loki and met his gaze, which had been silently tracking her through all the pacing and ranting. “Fuck this place. Peace. Mic drop. I’m out, bitches. Have fun holding your shit together without me, because I’m blowing this popsicle stand.”

Harleen crossed her arms in front of her chest and stood to her full, unimpressive height, ready to fight him on it if he said no. “I help you escape, you help me escape. That’s the deal. Agreed?”

She set her mouth in a stubborn expression and defiantly stuck her hand out for a shake. Loki left it hanging for a long time, silently considering. Harleen could see the wheels turning in his head as he thought through every angle, every possibility, probably plenty that Harleen herself hadn’t thought of. She was just beginning to regret going down this path, just trying to think of ways she could take it back, when he suddenly clasped his smooth, cool hand in hers and firmly shook it once.

“Your terms are acceptable,” he agreed, and gestured politely to the security panel.


	10. Chapter 10

The storage room reminded Harleen of the warehouse at the end of  _ Raiders of the Lost Ark _ . Long, long rows of crates sat stacked almost up to the ceiling, shelves giving a few feet of clearance between them. Most were unlabeled, but there were numbered signs at regular intervals along the rows and what looked like a manifest on a clipboard hung by a forklift parked next to the door.

Loki seemed to know where he was going. He glanced once at the nearest number, then set off with long strides to another number several rows down, where he turned left without waiting to see if Harleen was keeping up.

She did keep up, jogging along determinedly with four or five steps to match every one of his as he followed a path only he understood. With the crates stacked in a neat grid, it seemed to her that the most efficient route to wherever they were going would be all the way along one axis and then all the way along the other, but he turned several more times at no landmarks she could see, sometimes doubling back along one row when they’d been going the opposite way two rows behind.

Harleen wondered if he was lost and just didn’t want to admit it, or if he was intentionally taking a circuitous route to confuse and disorient her. If so, it was working. She was just about to speak up and tell him that if he didn’t know where he was going, they may as well both go back to bed when he stopped without warning and she narrowly avoided stepping on his heels.

At first, there was nothing to distinguish the crate before them from any other, but as she looked it over, Harleen realized that its lid was connected with a latch and hinges, rather than being simply nailed on like the others. The latch had a hefty-looking padlock dangling from it, but Loki paced around to the back of the crate and fiddled with the hinges for a moment before dropping their pins on the ground with a tinkle and muttering, “ _Midgardians!_ I ask you… _”_ scornfully under his breath.

Harleen couldn’t help but smile. Without waiting for an invitation, she came up next to the crate as Loki opened it and peered inside. It was empty, and bottomless. In the dim light, she could just make out an open hatch set flush with the floor, with a ladder leading down into total darkness.

“I thought you said your little secret passage led up to the surface,” she said. “That goes  _ down _ .”

“A stunning observation, Dr. Quinzel,” Loki said drily. “Perhaps for your next feat of brilliance, you can differentiate left from right.”

Harleen kicked him hard in the ankle. She’d been wanting to do that for months. Damn, but it was relaxing not having to be professional with his smartassery anymore.

Loki didn’t flinch or even acknowledge the assault. Instead he stood slightly back, gallantly lifting the lid as high as the shelf above would allow and spreading his other arm in a welcoming gesture. “After you, kitten.”

Harleen pushed up on her toes to stare back into the crate again. It was impossible to tell how far down the ladder went. “Nope,” she said immediately, her stomach doing a tiny flip. “Nope, nope, nope. You first. That ladder could go anywhere, and I have trust issues with you for  _ some reason. _ I won’t go down there until you do.”

Loki eyed her, and she got the distinct impression that he knew full well that that wasn’t the only reason she didn’t want to go down the ladder. He didn’t call her out on it, though. “I’d be happy to proceed without you, but I thought you might prefer I remain outside to assist you over the wall,” he pointed out, and Harleen realized he was right. The box was almost as tall as she was, and without a boost, it would take her forever to clamber over its side.

“Fine,” she said shortly. “But you’re still going all the way down first.”

“If I must,” Loki sighed. He managed to catch the lid of the crate on the lip of the shelf above so it held itself up, and put both his hands around her waist to hoist her into the air the way he had when they’d danced that first dream that wasn’t a dream. Harleen supposed they had been in her room the entire time; he must have led the dance masterfully to make use of the small space without disrupting the illusion of the massive ballroom.

Once she’d cleared the wall, Harleen grabbed the splintery wood along the top plank and lowered herself the rest of the way into the crate. There was a lip of flooring between its sides and the hatch, but she miscalculated the distance and one foot shot into the empty space of the tunnel before she scrambled back onto the safety of the concrete, her heart thudding loudly and the echoes of her startled yelp bouncing along down the tunnel. It was no easier to tell from here how far down it went.

Loki landed across the hatch from her in one fluid motion. There was plenty of space for the both of them, but Harleen still pressed herself against the wall as though one wrong motion could send them both falling into the hole. He reached up to free the lid and close it behind them, saying, “No point being obvious about it.”

Harleen agreed, in spite of the near-pitch-black darkness this left them in. Her absence wouldn’t be noticed until some time after Loki’s, and it was only then that S.H.I.E.L.D. would check the records to see she’d accessed the warehouse and work out the rest from there. Until then, they’d have no reason to suspect anyone had come this way, and would be concentrating on the more commonly known exits.

Loki’s eyes glinted at her out of the darkness, picking up the tiny shafts of light still filtering in between narrow gaps between the boards.  _ Do normal people’s eyes reflect light that well?  _ she wondered.  _ Or is that an Asgardian thing? _

She felt more than saw his movement towards the ladder and down it, and waited, huddling in her corner.

After several long moments, Harleen heard the soft thud of Loki landing on solid ground. “It’s not far,” he called up to her. “We haven’t got all night.”

He  _ sounded _ far, but Harleen couldn’t tell how much of that was due to the echoes and their distortions. She hesitated another second, but then had a mental image of Loki continuing along without her, not caring whether or not she followed, and leaving her alone in a maze of tunnels at the bottom of the long drop.

She scrambled to the ladder and steeled herself to climb down. Her hands on the iron rails bolted into the concrete were sweaty and slippery, and she had images of losing her grip and falling forever into the darkness, like Alice down the rabbit’s hole, just falling, falling, through miles of earth and rock.

She clung more tightly to each rail, and continued down.

Climbing more slowly, it took her longer than it had Loki to reach the bottom, but it still wasn’t very far before she suddenly felt his hands around her waist again. She started, surprised, but then relaxed into his arms, gratefully unclenching her fingers from around the last rail.

Her knees wobbled a little as he gently settled her onto the ground, but she managed to stay standing  _ without _ clinging to his arm, for which she was very proud of herself.

“Stay close,” Loki told her, and set off along the tunnel. Harleen didn’t need to be told twice. The worst part seemed to be over, and she didn’t have any particular fear of the dark, but the last thing she needed was to get separated from her new partner-in-crime and wander around blindly who-knows-where.

He was going slightly more slowly down here, but that seemed to be more for her benefit than out of his own necessity; as far as Harleen could tell, he was having no trouble finding where to put his feet or avoiding running into the wall.  _ I wonder if he can see in the dark? There really haven’t been enough studies on the physiological differences between Asgardians and humans. _

She kept right behind him, running the fingers of her other hand along the wall beside her. They seemed to be going in a straight line, and there weren’t any gaps or openings in the wall, so the tunnel must have been rather less maze-like than she feared.

After the third time Harleen accidentally stepped on his heels, Loki seemed to lose patience. “Here,” he said sharply, and suddenly there was the green outline of a butterfly drifting and fluttering in the air before Harleen. It looked like it was glowing, though it didn’t seem to give off any actual illumination, and it flitted along just behind Loki so she could follow him without clinging so closely.

It was actually kind of fun, chasing the illusory butterfly through the dark. A few times, she got close enough to wave her fingers experimentally through it and watch in curiosity as they passed through the empty air, the butterfly re-forming behind them.

“Careful here,” Loki murmured after a few minutes, and the butterfly soared a few inches higher into the air. Harleen carefully felt her way up a few shallow steps without managing to stub her toes on any of them, and then Loki stopped in front of her abruptly, her tiny green guide vanishing again.

She bumped into his back, and he made a soft noise that might have been a hiss of annoyance or a chuckle of laughter or both. “There should be…” he said, as though thinking out loud. “Yes, here it is. Ah, no. I am apparently not worthy. Come here, Harley.”

“You keep calling me that,” she grumbled, letting Loki guide her around in front of him.

“Would you rather I not?” he asked as he took her hand and raised it, pressing her palm against what she recognized as another biometrics panel. It didn’t sound like he actually cared what she’d rather, but Harleen realized she didn’t actually mind.

“No, you can,” she said. “It’s just weird, that’s all. Nobody’s called me Harley in years.”

A green light flickered at her in the darkness, and then a set of doors slid open, revealing a bright glow. Harleen hissed in pain and shielded her eyes until they adjusted. Loki, as usual, seemed unphased, the smug bastard.

Harleen turned around and looked curiously back the way they’d come. The tunnel was indeed a straight shot from the base of the ladder to the steps they’d just ascended. In front of them, an elevator stood empty and waiting. Only one way forward. Only one way back.

Loki did his little “after you” bow again, and Harleen stepped into the elevator without argument, Loki close behind. There was a single button on the interior panel, unlabeled.  _ Now boarding the non-stop express to freedom. _

Harleen hovered her finger over the button and glanced at Loki, who nodded. She pushed it, and the doors slid shut as the elevator slowly rose.

For the third time that night, Harleen felt Loki’s hands settle around her waist as he stepped up behind her. The back of her neck broke out in goosebumps as his unnaturally cool breath drifted across her ear. “From what I understand, there is quite a distance between here and the surface,” he said softly into it. “However shall we pass all that time?”


	11. Chapter 11

Harleen’s breath caught in her throat, and she shivered pleasantly.  _ Don’t you dare fall for it, Harley Quinzel, _ she ordered herself.  _ He’s the same mean, dangerous snake he always was. Your badly-thought-out little partnership hasn’t changed that. _

It was a nice speech, but it didn’t stop her from slowly tilting her head to expose her neck as Loki moved one of her pigtails aside and brushed his lips against the shoulder beneath it.

“It seems like you already have something in mind; why bother asking me?” She kept her face turned away so he wouldn’t see her smile as she answered his question with another question, but it was more difficult to keep the smile out of her voice.

“Would you not prefer to share your own suggestions?” He’d taken her hand now and lifted it to gently kiss her palm and the inside of her wrist, his other hand tightening on her waist. Goosebumps flushed up and down both of her arms.

“Are we playing this game again?” Harleen rolled her eyes as he pulled her hand to lead her into a little spin, facing him. Leave it to Mr. L to start playing word games at a moment like this.

Part of Harleen was telling herself to snatch her arm away, tell him she wasn’t his whore, and maybe knee him in the crotch for good measure.

Another, somewhat louder, voice wanted to push him to the ground and fuck him on the spot. The two bickered with each other inside her head, and all the while she and Loki batted their questions back and forth.

“Is it not an enjoyable pastime?”

_ Slap him. _

“Is it  _ really _ the pastime you had in mind?”

_ Kiss him. _

“Why? Is there another pastime you’d enjoy?”

_ Slap him,  _ then _ kiss him. _

As if he’d heard her inner dialogue, he took her other hand and laced his fingers through hers, slowly backing her up against the elevator’s side wall until her arms were lightly pinned there. 

“What do you know about what  _ I _ would enjoy?” she asked pointedly.

“What makes you believe I do not already know everything about you?” Pushing her arms a little harder against the wall, Loki bent his head and planted another kiss inside the hollow of her throat, then began trailing his lips up and around her neck to nip playfully at her earlobe. A purr almost slipped out of Harleen’s throat, but she shut it down, refusing to let him see how much she was enjoying herself.

“Why would you even care about someone you were planning to throw under the bus?”

“How can you be certain this was not a part of my plans?”

“Was it?”

“Why should I tell you?”

Harleen didn’t answer. He’d moved his lips down her jawline until they were almost directly over hers, so close she could feel them brushing against her as he spoke, his cool breath making her lips tingle. She felt like an over-tuned string, almost vibrating with the anticipation of his next move.

He paused, and for a moment, she thought he was going to kiss her, but then he kept moving down to the other side of her neck. This time, Harleen couldn’t contain the frustrated sound she made, somewhere between a growl and a whimper.

He laughed at her and pulled away to meet her eyes mockingly, still locking her wrists against the wall. “Now who’s being impatient?”

“Why are you such an asshole?” she demanded.

He only laughed at her again, before brushing a cold kiss across her forehead. The gesture startled Harleen; it was too affectionate for him. His grip around her wrists softened slightly. In fact, his whole manner seemed to soften, doing another of his switches, but this time into one she hadn’t seen before. He seemed gentle and caring; the dangerous madman who’d kill or torture her if it was even slightly more convenient than the next alternative had vanished completely.

“You missed something back there,” he told her, nuzzling the top of her head.

Harleen was almost more surprised that he’d given up the game before she had -- a first, in all their conversations -- than by his sudden about-face. Still stuck on questions for another moment, she asked, “What do you mean? Back where?”

“When we were… negotiating the terms of our exeunt,” he said, seeming to choose his words carefully, “you pointed out, quite correctly, that forcing you to release me would not be nearly so entertaining as finding other methods. Generally, yes, there is more excitement to be found in the hiding and seeking, the outwitting, the tricks and temptations. Avoiding the fight  _ is _ my preferred way to win it. But…”

Without warning, Loki locked his fingers back around her wrists with the same vice-like grip he’d used outside the warehouse door, wrenching her arms up above her head and slamming them against the wall there. Harleen gasped in mingled pain and lust, realizing too late that this latest switch had been a ploy to disorient and disarm her, lowering her defenses.

“Occasionally,” he snarled, his savage grin spreading across his face. “The fight is what makes it fun.”

Harleen matched his grin, pushing her arms forward against his, trying to free herself -- not because she thought she had even the slightest chance of overpowering him, or even because she wanted to, but because it was fun and exciting and dangerous, and she could see how her struggles were exciting him too.

Loki’s lips crashed down on hers and he slipped his tongue between her teeth. Harleen opened her mouth greedily to welcome him in and moaned through his lips as he pressed against her, pinning her whole body to the wall. She pushed back against him with all the force she could muster, working her mouth against his and exploring his tongue with hers.

He pulled her hands closer together, and with a deft maneuver that didn’t give her long enough to take advantage of the switch, got one of his hands around both of her wrists, still pinning them against the wall and letting his other hand roam free around her body while they kissed.

He pushed the hair back from her face, traced the outline of her ear with long fingertips, and rested his entire hand briefly around her throat as if he were considering choking her out again before moving along her shoulder and down over her breast, where he thumbed her nipple lightly as it strained through the fabric of her nightshirt, making her moan again.

She fought harder to free her hands, trying to break away in earnest this time, wanting to touch him, needing to touch him. But he held her with no more difficulty than when she’d just been play-fighting, and worked his free arm behind her, moving it shamelessly down and across the ass of her jeans and curling it around her hips. With just the slightest grunt of effort breathed into the kiss, Loki hitched her up one-handed, letting her wrap her legs around his waist and holding her up between his body and the wall.

Tightening her legs around him, Harleen ground her hips in little circles as they kissed, and he purred throatily and finally released her arms so he could pull her away from the wall and hold onto her ass with both hands. She pushed her fingers back through his long, dark hair on both sides of his head, pulling his face closer to hers, probing her tongue deeper against his.

Harleen wasn’t sure how long they kissed, couldn’t tell how far they’d gone up with the slow, inexorable rise of the elevator. This was no race, as it had been with Dr. Marven in the empty office, beaten barely to the finish line by the buzz of the all-clear. Loki kissed her like they had all the time in the world -- which, she supposed, they did.

Eventually, he disentangled his tongue from hers and gently freed his lower lip from where she tugged at it with her teeth, trying to keep him with her. He lowered her to the ground, where she staggered much worse than she had after the pitch-black climb down the ladder back in the tunnel, and breathlessly leaned against the elevator wall to stay upright.

“We should be arriving shortly,” he murmured into her ear. “It’s time we prepare.”

“Prepare for what?” she asked dazedly. How had time stopped like that? What time even was it now? She felt suddenly sluggish, drunk on his kisses and pleasantly sleepy -- until Loki flicked her sharply with his fingers in the middle of the forehead.

“Ow!” she yelped, jumping back from him and scowling fiercely.

“Wake up, kitten,” he ordered, laughing at her again. “You’ll need your wits about you when we meet the guard above.”

“You didn’t tell me there were going to be guards!” she accused him, tugging her baseball jersey back down into place from where his meandering hands had pushed it up.

“I assumed you possessed the intelligence to realize that your people wouldn’t leave any path in our out of their fortress unguarded, regardless of how little it may be known,” Loki said haughtily. “Clearly, I miscalculated.”

“S.H.I.E.L.D.’s not  _ my _ people anymore,” Harleen snapped. “And I assumed  _ you _ would be smart enough to share the relevant facts that would help us both get out of here alive.”

“Then clearly,  _ you _ miscalculated,” he told her, his eyes sparkling. Then, with no apparent context, “Play along!”

Without any warning, he pushed her around to face the doors, wrapping one arm around her waist to hold her in front of him as the elevator came sliding to a stop.


	12. Chapter 12

“So much for preparation,” Harleen muttered under her breath.

Loki hissed in her ear to shush her. She felt him groping at her back pocket with the arm that wasn’t holding her and was about to ask if this was really the time anymore when she realized he was pulling out a pen she’d left in there forever ago, the last time she’d worn these jeans.

He held the pen up under her chin, and a slight shimmer washed over it, turning the nondescript pen into his Chitauri scepter. Another shimmer out of the corner of her eye told her he’d gone full god-mode, the sweeping horns of his helmet emphasizing how high he towered over her. 

The illusion had only just stabilized when the elevator doors slid aside with a surprisingly mundane  _ ding! _ sound to reveal two S.H.I.E.L.D. guards in black helmets and flak jackets training guns on the two of them.

_ Only two? _ Harleen thought. But it made sense, as she thought about it. S.H.I.E.L.D. wouldn’t want to waste a lot of manpower on this little outpost, just to guard an unlisted door that probably hadn’t seen any traffic since it was built. There were fairly even odds that Loki’s disappearance would have been noticed by now -- although Harleen was willing to reduce those odds, given how he’d apparently been wandering freely around at night for weeks without anyone noticing -- but nobody would realize  _ she  _ was missing for at least a few more hours, and they’d have no reason to suspect he’d chosen this specific route even if the alarm had been raised below.

Well, if she  _ had _ to be the damsel in distress, Harleen decided she’d earned the right to have a little fun with her role. “Don’t shoot!” she squealed at the guards. “Don’t let him hurt me, please! He was gonna kill me if I didn’t open the door!” She managed some reasonably convincing sobs and watched their eyes widen between their helmets and their facemasks as they took in the armed and dangerous god and his helpless hostage.

“Release the girl!”

“Don’t move!”

“Drop your weapon!”

“Stop or we’ll shoot!”

Loki strode forward out of the elevator, apparently deaf to the conflicting orders the guards shouted over each other, still using Harleen as a meat shield. She hoped sincerely they were well-trained enough to not start panic-firing, and wondered how much Loki would care if they did. He’d been perfectly content to leave her to her fate before she’d finally caught on to his illusions, and she wasn’t sure how much their deal had changed that, fun elevator make-outs or not.

The room outside the elevator was a small security station with two empty chairs pulled up in front of a bank of monitors. Some showed various angles of the quiet desert night outside of the station, while others, presumably those for the warehouse, the tunnel, and the elevator, held only static -- Loki’s doing somehow, Harleen assumed.

Once he’d reached the center of the room, Loki grinned, said, “Catch!” and tossed the pen-scepter high in the air above one guard while he shoved Harleen at the other. Harleen had just a split second to admire how closely the pen mimicked the physics of the much larger weapon as it spun in the air before her guard caught her, and pulled her farther away from Loki.

“Don’t worry, ma’am,” he reassured her, his voice muffled through the cloth facemask. He had brown eyes. He seemed nice. “You’ll be sa--”

His nose  _ crunched _ underneath the mask with an ugly splintering sound and Harleen winced, shaking her hand out -- she had never really punched anyone that hard before, not even Loki, and she didn’t realize how much it would make her knuckles hurt.

Tears sprung to his brown eyes, and he tried to pull the handgun around to point at her, but Harleen drove a second punch into his side, finding the vulnerable gap where his vest fastened, and wrestled the gun away from him.

Sparing a quick glance towards Loki, she saw he had made short work of the second guard, who now lay knocked out on the ground, and had his arms folded as he impassively watched her grapple with the guard, who was twice her size and currently in the process of trying to force her arms behind her back and reclaim the gun.

“Would you like this dance?” she offered Loki irritably, barely managing to twist the gun out of the guard’s reach and aiming an elbow at his eyes.

“I’d hate to interrupt,” Loki drawled elegantly. “You seem to be having fun.”

Harleen turned to flash a glare at him, and saw that the second guard had come to -- or had possibly just been faking -- and was raising her gun behind Loki.

There was no time to warn him, no time to think about it. Shaking off another attempt to restrain her arms, Harleen managed to raise her own stolen gun and fired twice. The first shot went wide, but the second caught Loki’s guard under the chin and she collapsed back again, blood pooling beneath her head.

It was the first time, Harleen realized, that she had ever seen Loki  _ actually  _ surprised, and not just mimicking the emotion to mock or deceive her. He jerked around to look at the dead guard, whom he clearly hadn’t realized had gotten so close to doing the same to him, and then back to Harleen.

The expression on his face was completely alien to her. For all her training and her experience in reading people, she couldn’t even begin to say if it contained horror or gratitude, shock or boredom, pride or laughter. There was no human emotion she recognized, and, for all that she’d known it objectively all along, Harleen fully grasped for the first time that Loki was not, had never been, human.

Harleen and Loki held each other’s eyes for what had to have been only a second, maybe less, but stretched into an eternity. She felt frozen in time and place, barely conscious of the guard behind her successfully wrenching the gun out of her hands. He was shouting something at her, but the words slowed down beyond her comprehension, mingling with the high-pitched aftermath of the gunshot and drawing themselves out into nonsensical syllables before they met her ears.

All her attention was on Loki, who stepped over the body of the guard, strolled past Harleen’s no-longer-illusioned pen, which was lying just on the edge of the spreading pool of blood, and simply walked away.

It wasn’t until the heavy door to the security outpost slammed shut behind him that time resumed its normal pace. Harleen tasted blood in her mouth and realized she’d cut her tongue between her teeth when the remaining guard forced her to the ground, his knee shoved painfully between her shoulder blades.

Her throat was raw, and she was dimly aware that she’d been shouting too, was still screaming at the closed door, a black-stained dent on it showing where the guard had fired at Loki, just too late.

“ _ GODDAMMIT LOKI, YOU BASTARD, YOU MOTHERFUCKING BASTARD, YOU DON’T GET TO LEAVE ME HERE, YOU CAN’T JUST FUCKING WALK AWAY FROM ME, YOU GODDAMN _ \--”

A sharp pain like a bee-sting blossomed at the side of her neck. Silence and darkness washed across her consciousness in stages, like a series of waves wiping away letters in the sand, and then nothing else hurt.


	13. Chapter 13

Everything hurt.

Everything.

There were cramps in her calves and her sides from her frantic run away from Loki’s imaginary monsters, and her feet were sore from all the walking that had followed. Her wrists and shoulders ached from where he’d held her up against the wall in the elevator, a memory that was now significantly more bitter in light of recent events. She had bruises on her arms from the fight with the guard, and was reasonably sure there was an especially ugly one between her shoulders from where his knee had dug in. Her palms were skinned from hitting the floor so hard; her knees had been spared the same fate by the denim of her jeans, but they still ached from the slam into the ground. The cut across her tongue stung when she probed it against her teeth -- which she often did, just to feel it, just to remind herself that it was there -- and her throat still burned from screaming.

Most of all, a heavy thud of pain throbbed through her head with the thunder of a thousand hangovers. Presumably, that was the side effect of whatever the guard had used to subdue her -- triazolam, maybe, or brotizolam. It’s what she would have recommended. It was giving her god-awful dry mouth, too.

All of that felt trivial, though, next to the anger.

Harleen was angry at Loki for having betrayed her, angry at herself for expecting anything different, angry at S.H.I.E.L.D. for holding her  _ FOR SO GODDAMN LONG _ without  _ DOING ANYTHING. _

It was a personal slight, an insult, a taunt that she was too unimportant, her wrongdoings too small-time to bother with.

_ Loki _ was the important one, after all, wasn’t he?  _ He  _ was the Big Bad, the supervillain, the public menace at large. What had  _ she  _ done? Opened a door and shot a guard. Big deal. One death against hundreds. One of the first things she’d done when she woke up in the bare, white cell was go ahead and process that out of the way so it wouldn’t pop up and start haunting her later.

_ Own it, Harley. You pulled the trigger, and someone’s dead. She was probably a good person. She probably didn’t deserve it, but you did it and you can’t undo it. At least you had a better reason  _ this _ time. Not a  _ good _ reason, but at least you had any reason at all. See? Progress. Suck it up, move on, and do better next time. _

Processing complete.  _ Ding. _

Regret was pointless, and Harleen had no time for it.

Well, ‘time’ was apparently a non-issue today. She had no idea how many hours it had been since then, or if it had even been a matter of hours at all. It certainly felt like it, but when she tried to hold her breath and count out ten seconds, just to see how long they passed, she only made it to four before getting too furiously impatient to continue, so she couldn’t objectively trust her own sense of temporal perception.

She wondered where she was. This didn’t look like her own facility; it was newer, shinier, higher-tech. The cell wasn’t equipped for a long-term stay like the ones she knew. It didn’t even have a cot; she’d woken on the smooth, hard floor, still in her jeans and nightshirt and pigtails. Probably they were keeping her in temporary storage somewhere while they figured out what to do with her -- where it would be least inconvenient to stick her when they were done with her.

The anger pounded away, in time with the headache.

There was a camera in the corner of the cell, a round, blue dome that watched her every move. Harleen flipped it the bird sometimes, when she remembered it was there.

Sitting on the floor made her ass hurt. Standing made her feet cold and tired. She was too antsy to stay still for long, anyway, so she walked around and around the cell.

It was easier to stay focused on counting when she was in motion, she found. Three seconds along a short wall, five for a long one, six diagonally, thirteen for a full lap, eighteen to make an hourglass of the space, weaving in and out from corner to corner, creating an angular lemniscate with her footsteps, building a two-dimensional Möbius out of her restlessness and fury.

She was beginning to piss herself off.

Not just for trusting Loki --  _ stupid little fucking idiot, Harley, you goddamn naïve child, what the fuck did you expect was going to happen? _ \-- but for  _ thinking _ so much and so loudly, for not switching off or shutting up or taking a goddamn break every once in a while.

How much of her time had she thrown into distracting herself before now, just so she didn’t have to hear herself think so goddamn much?

It didn’t matter now. There were no distractions here. Just Harleen and her own insufferable brain.

A hundred and sixteen rectangular laps. Forty-three hourglass shapes. A few other experimental patterns, but none of them with the same mathematical elegance. Call it seventy-eight seconds’ worth of those. Two thousand, three hundred, and sixty-nine seconds. Just under forty minutes, and she felt like she was going crazier than Loki had ever managed to drive her.

Harleen kept pacing and thinking and counting. She paused to rub her still-bare feet on the opposing legs of her jeans, and remembered the last time she’d done that, pacing a lifetime ago in front of the warehouse door, rationalizing her own lack of impulse control, giving Loki more to use against her in one frustrated, childish rant than she’d given him in all the rest of the time she’d known him combined.

Rage bursting to the surface again, she whirled on the camera, fists balled up at her sides. “I’m  _ BORED! _ ” she screamed at it, knowing it probably didn’t have audio, and not giving a damn.

“Sorry about the lack of in-house entertainment,” someone said, walking up to the cell. “We thought about putting flat-screens in, but, you know, TV rots your brain.”

“Oh, thank  _ fuck, _ ” Harleen breathed, leaning against the back wall of the cell, not even caring that she’d been snuck up on, just intensely relieved to have somebody  _ not _ -Harleen to talk to.

“Hmm. I usually have to put in a little more effort to make girls say that.”

Tony Stark was standing opposite the reinforced glass of the cell’s front wall, eating dried blueberries out of a  shiny plastic pouch. Harleen was mildly amused, but not surprised, to note that Loki’s version had been much more accurate to the original than his media image. Next to him, Nick Fury himself stood at attention, arms behind his back.

“And here I thought everyone had forgotten about little ol’ me,” Harleen cooed, coming up to the glass and turning her customer service smile up to eleven. “I didn’t realize we were waiting on such an important welcoming committee.”

“Dr. Quinzel, do you know why you are here?” Fury asked, staring her down with his one eye.

“Ooh, don’t tell me! I love guessing games!” she squealed. She’d gone through far too much in the past day to waste time being intimidated. “Am I getting a promotion? Extra vacation days? My own parking space?”

“I like her,” Stark commented with his mouth full, gesturing at Harleen with a blueberry. “She doesn’t take shit from you.”

“Yes, charming,” Fury grunted. He activated the cell door, stepped in, and cuffed her hands quickly behind her back. Harleen stood with polite docility and let him do it; she wasn’t dumb enough to try taking on either one of them alone, much less both together.

“You haven’t said if I guessed it yet,” she pointed out as he steered her out of the room, and the two men frog-marched her down the bright white hall. “Tell me if I’m getting warmer. Did you want my decorating advice? Because I was never super into interior design, but I can tell you that colors are your friends. You also might want to think about swapping out those fluorescents for something warmer and more flattering, and maybe revisit the flat-screen idea.”

“See, I told you,” Stark said to Fury. “Nobody likes the fluorescent lights.”

“This is not a spa, Mr. Stark. I do not care how pleasant the lighting is.”

“It is if I want it to be; it’s my building. Got my name on it and everything. Well, it did.”

Harleen, who had been discreetly peering around them for clues about their location, lifted her eyebrows in mild surprise at Stark before she realized it was an expression she’d picked up from Loki and dropped it irritably.

“New York, huh?” she asked. “Well, that’ll make my mom happy, at least. How have the Mets been doing this season? I’d chat about the weather, but I’m honestly kind of out of the loop on climatic variances; I’ve spent most of the past few years underground in… Nevada? Utah? New Mexico? Australia?”

Harleen looked expectantly from one man to the other as they turned her around a corner into a more refined area of the skyscraper, with creamy beige walls and a plush carpet that she squeezed between her toes with each step. Here and there, ladders and drop-cloths betrayed its ongoing renovations from the destruction of last May.

“Wow, you guys are really bad at this game. When I guess something that’s  _ more _ accurate, you say ‘warmer,’ and when I’m getting further away, you say ‘colder.’ Got it? Let’s try again.” She turned to wink broadly up at Stark. “Boxers? Briefs? ...Commando?”

“Remind me why we did not bring a muzzle,” Fury growled, cutting across Stark’s answer. Harleen pouted.

“Hey, I suggested a gag,” Stark said. “Widow said I was being misogynistic and gross. Well, in so many words. Take it up with her.”

“Take what up with me?”

A lean, red-headed woman stood next to a conference room door as they approached it, her arms folded. She wasn’t as instantaneously recognizable as the famous billionaire or the distinctive S.H.I.E.L.D. director, but Harleen was the sort of person who liked to stay informed.

“Little Miss Sunshine here --” Stark began, lifting Harleen’s elbow as he steered her up to the door.

“Director Fury took umbrage with my loquacity, Agent Romanoff,” Harleen informed her cheerfully. “I don’t think he liked having to imagine Mr. Stark here going commando.”

She grinned as she caught the quickest of microexpressions flit across the agent’s face before Romanoff contained her amusement.

“Is Barton…?” Fury asked.

“Inside,” she answered, jerking her head at the door before pushing up off the wall and leading the way through it. Stark followed, and Fury pushed Harleen along behind them.

The conference room was fairly typical of its kind. Long, dark wood table. Comfy leather wheelie chairs. Paneled glass windows -- not floor-to-ceiling, but big enough for Harleen to eye them with suspicion as she was deposited in one of the chairs. She guessed from the sun that it was mid-morning-ish. Stark took a seat at the head of the table, propping his feet up on it, and Fury circled the room.

A man stood by the window in the corner, staring out over the city and looking troubled -- Agent Barton, presumably. Romanoff walked up to him as she entered the room, and they conversed quickly and quietly. Harleen could just make out a few snatches of what they were saying, but they seemed to be rehashing an argument that had already been settled.

“...not an expert, Tasha. Shouldn’t we bring in…”

“...still unsuccessful. Nobody knows…”

“...has to be someone…”

“...know better than anyone will. You were…”

“...not the point. I’m not qualified…”

“...I trust your…”

“Do you usually eavesdrop on private conversations, Dr. Quinzel?” Fury asked abruptly, standing behind the chair across from her and leaning on its back. Harleen realized she’d been leaning closer to them as she listened intently.

“Only when I’m being held against my will in the same room as them and haven’t been given anything more interesting to talk about,” Harleen assured him cheerfully. “Got somethin’ better for me?”

“Why don’t we start with why you accessed a restricted area of your assigned facility at 01:37 last night?”

“You don’t seem like the small talk type to me, Director Fury. Aren’t you more interested in what happened after?”

Just then, the two agents in the corner finished their argument, and Barton strode over to Harleen’s side of the table with an air of wanting to get something over with. Without preamble, he lifted her chin up with blocky, callused fingers and looked her in the eyes, searching for something there as he jerked her face left and right.

“I don’t know,” he finally said, dropping her chin and turning away with an air of defeat. “It doesn’t look like it, and my instincts say no, but I can’t tell for sure. And I don’t know why else someone would…”

He trailed off, arms crossed against his chest. Romanoff rested a hand on his arm and said something softly that Harleen couldn’t quite catch.

“If you’re wondering about my baby blues, they’re natural,” she offered, spinning a little back and forth in her chair. It was a bit uncomfortable, with her hands squished in their cuffs between her back and the chair, but it was better than sitting still. “From my dad’s side, mostly. One of my best features, don’tcha think?”

“Fine. You want to cut to the chase?” Fury interrupted, leaning over the table. “Where is Loki now?”

“What’s it worth to you?” Harleen asked pleasantly.

“You aren’t really in a position to be making demands,” Romanoff pointed out, stepping slightly in front of Barton to address her.

“Did I make a demand? Was I demanding anything?” She swiveled back towards the end of the table, where Stark seemed entirely focused on his blueberries. “Did you hear me making demands?”

“I didn’t,” he acknowledged. Romanoff and Fury gave him matching exasperated looks.

“I just asked a question,” she continued reasonably. “A pretty standard baseline for opening negotiations.”

“Does it look like we are in the mood to negotiate?” Fury asked.

“So, hypothetically speaking…” Harleen was having fun. The anger pounding away in her head and her chest hadn’t really lessened with the new distractions, but had bubbled into sort of a malicious glee. If she was going to be perpetually pissed off, why not piss off everyone else around her?

“If I offered to tell you  _ everything  _ I know about Loki, absolutely everything -- everything that’s not already in my notes, that is; I assume you have access to those, and we do  _ not _ have the time to even begin unpacking his neuroses -- but if I give you everything else I’ve got, what would that be worth to you?”

She looked away from Fury to meet Stark’s and Romanoff’s eyes in turn. She tried for Barton’s, but he refused to make eye contact with her again. “Would it be worth, say, for instance, total immunity from recent events? We were never here, this conversation never happened, and I get to go back to doing my job like normal?”

Fury and Romanoff traded a look. Barton looked mildly furious.

“Is that what you’re asking for? You want to wipe your slate?” Romanoff asked, her tone carefully neutral.

Harleen genuinely considered the question. She didn’t consider it for long, but she considered it, just to check in with herself and make sure she was still on the same page with herself.

“I really don’t,” she said, shaking her head and continuing to address Fury. “Not even a little bit. I was just curious to see if you would do it. I’m not surprised you wouldn’t; I wouldn’t either, if it were me.”

“Then what the hell do you want?” he demanded.

“Oh, so I  _ do _ get to make demands now?” she asked gleefully, leaning forward.

“That depends on what the  _ hell you want _ ,” Fury said, enunciating his last words clearly.

Harleen considered that question too, curling her tongue up between her teeth while she thought about what she wanted. The cut in it still hurt. Everything still hurt. Then… Oh, what the hell? She’d been picking back up a lot of old bad habits lately. What was one more?

“Ya got any gum?”


	14. Chapter 14

“Gum,” said Fury. It wasn’t really a question or a statement. All four of her interrogators stared at her, nonplussed.

“Yeah, you know: polymer-based confectionery, wrapped in paper, minor choking hazard, tastes like artificial sweeteners and joy?” Harleen mimed chewing a piece of gum. “Ringing a bell?”

Fury stared at her for another long moment, squinting his eye, then glanced at Stark, who swung his legs off the table, and came around to join them on Fury’s side of the room. He activated a screen over the table; Harleen could see a blue-tinged photo of herself floating next to text, mirrored from her perspective, that scrolled rapidly through the air.

“I looked over your file, Dr. Quinzel,” Fury said as Stark flicked through the screens.

“Ran out of bedtime reading?”

He ignored that. “By all accounts, you had a very promising career in front of you. Possibly  _ the _ most promising doctor in our psychological program, in fact. In one of your initial interviews, you said working for S.H.I.E.L.D. would be…” He glanced at the scrolling text. “...A dream come true.”

“Accurate,” Harleen agreed, nodding.

“And then,” he continued, “in one night, you threw all of that away. You assisted in the escape of a class-five prisoner, stole a weapon from a S.H.I.E.L.D. personnel member, and shot and _killed_ \--” He slammed both hands on the table to emphasize the point. “ -- another in the course of enabling Loki’s escape.”

Harleen smirked, her face stretched with more anger than amusement. “Also accurate.”

“And now… After all of that...” Fury rested his fists knuckles-down on the table, staring at her through the transparent file. “You’re offering to sell him out... for a stick of gum.”

“Bubblegum, if you have it,” she agreed sweetly, kicking her feet back and forth under the table. “I like the pink kind.”

The director sighed heavily, like he just couldn’t believe with what he had to put up with some days.

“Romanoff? Go get Dr. Quinzel here some goddamn bubblegum.”

“There, you see, Director?” Agent Romanoff slipped quietly from the room, and Harleen beamed up at Fury. “We can negotiate anything if we all compromise and work together.”

 

Harleen smacked her gum happily, and blew a decent-sized bubble. She was out of practice, but it was like riding a bicycle, really, and she managed to get the next one bigger before it popped. The mid-morning light poured through the big windows, warming her face with the first real sunshine she’d seen since she couldn’t remember when.

“Your turn, Doctor.”

Harleen sighed and pulled herself out of the blissful reverie, turning her attention to the interruption. “Go on,” she said, stretching the gum out with her fingers and snapping it back into her mouth. “Ask me anything you like.”

“Where is Loki now?”

“No idea.” She blew a small bubble.

“You promised me information, Quinzel.”

“I promised you all the information I had. I didn’t say it’d do you a lot of good. And let’s be fair,” she added, snapping the gum again, “you get what you pay for.”

“What  _ do _ you know, then?” Fury growled impatiently.

“I know the scientific names of beings animalculous, and many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse.” Harleen sing-songed, then frowned slightly. That didn’t quite sound correct. “Not quite as up on Gilbert & Sullivan, though. Ask me another.”

Fury half-turned away from the table and pinched the bridge of his nose. “What do you know about  _ Loki? _ ”

“Oh! You should’ve specified, Director. I know  _ lots _ about him. Like that he’s a sneaky rat bastard who likes the sound of his own voice  _ way  _ too much, but I’m pretty sure you already knew that.”

“He’s not the only one,” Barton muttered under his breath from where he’d resumed his brooding station near the window.

Harleen giggled delightedly and blew another bubble. “Am I talking too much? I could say less if you want.”

“You’ll talk until I decide you’re done,” Fury said. “And I might decide that soon if you don’t give me something useful. Keep talking, Quinzel.”

“I know his powers never stopped working,” she told him. “That containment collar still in its beta testing phase?” Fury didn’t answer, but she picked it up from his face. “Yeah, I thought so. It’s not like you can really run clinical trials on Asgardian magic, is it?”

Stark, who had sat down again next to where Fury was standing, swiveled a little in his chair and coughed slightly behind his hand.

“You’re right, Mr. Stark. I imagine your contributions would have been significantly more effective if you had taken a stab at the problem, although --” Her eyes darted to Romanoff, who had glanced briefly at Stark when Harleen mentioned him. “-- Agent Romanoff is also likely correct in thinking you’d have put off working on it until you had nothing better to do.”

“Yes, yes, very impressive, Dr. Quinzel. Focus, please.” The information about the collar had apparently been good enough that Fury had gone back to using her title, though he still sounded testy.

“I know he doesn’t have the Chitauri scepter, but he pretends he does. I think he plans to steal it back. Beyond that, I don’t know where he was planning to go next.” It was Fury and Stark who shared a significant look this time, and the latter’s gaze drifted subconsciously towards the ceiling. Harleen narrowed her eyes, trying to read that exchange. If it meant what she thought it did… things might get interesting soon.

She popped her gum, thinking of anything else they might find interesting that she cared to share. Despite her promise, she wasn’t giving them  _ everything _ she’d worked out about Loki and his plans during her enforced solitude. She wasn’t even really giving them anything useful that they couldn’t work out on their own. Call it strategy; call it spite. She didn’t feel like it.

“I know he had multiple ways to get information while he was in the facility, but I don’t know if his sources were aware he was using them.I know he pretty much had free reign down there, but I only found that out last night.”

“Anything else?”

Harleen chewed slowly, looking around at each of the four in turn. She blew her biggest bubble yet, smiling in satisfaction when it popped, and leaned across the table as far as the handcuffs would allow to grin wickedly at Fury. “I know he’s a  _ real  _ good kisser.”

Stark choked briefly on a blueberry, then tried to act like he’d only been clearing his throat. Barton made a quietly disgusted sound in the back of his throat. Romanoff looked like only the barest thread of professionalism was preventing her from face-palming on the spot.

“I really can’t think of anything less relevant to my present interests,” Fury deadpanned. “Is that all you have for me, Doctor?”

“For now,” Harleen shrugged. “Might remember something else later. I hear hot showers and comfy beds are  _ very  _ stimulating to the memory.”

“I’ll file that away with the rest of the information that I have no intention of acting upon. Romanoff, would you escort the doctor back to her accommodations while we locate a more long-term solution for her?”

“Happily, sir.”

Harleen was unceremoniously hauled out of her seat and escorted to the door, until Fury suddenly said, “Stop.”

Romanoff reinforced the command and jolted Harleen to a halt just outside the door, pushing her around to turn back to the S.H.I.E.L.D. director as he strode up and held a clean white napkin out in front of Harleen.

She glared, rolled her eyes dramatically, then spat the gum out into it, curling her lip into a resentful snarl at him as she was turned back away. She hadn’t had a specific plan in mind for the gum, but even a little bit of sticky polymer putty could be all kinds of useful for causing some chaos if they left her alone with herself for too long and let her get bored again.

Still, at least the walk back to the cell with gave her another brain to play with. “So, you and Agent Barton, huh?”

“Quiet.”

Walking in front of Romanoff without being able to see her face made the game harder than it had been with Stark and Fury on either side of her, but it was kind of more fun that way. Test her own limits. See what she could get from tonality and word choice and gait and the pressure of the hand on her shoulder.

“ _ Really? _ No? But I could’ve sworn… You guys would be  _ super _ cute together, I’m just sayin’.”

A brief, impatient exhalation. A subconscious twitch of the fingertips.

“See? You agree with me. Go for it, dollface. What’s stopping you? Is it because you work together? No? Do you have a boyfriend? Ooh, does  _ he _ have a girlfriend?”

“Well, Tony was right about the gag; I’ll give him that.”

“What’s her name? I bet she’s not as pretty as you, but you must really like her, or else you’d’ve gone for it anyway, wouldn’t you?”

“Aww, you think I’m pretty. How sweet.” Romanoff pushed Harleen around the corner from the nicer area of the tower and back down one of the stark white halls.

“Well, it it helps, Agent Barton definitely --”

Harleen’s next taunt was interrupted by a noisy  _ crash-boom _ combination that echoed down from what sounded like many stories above. Both women stopped and looked up at the ceiling, and then Romanoff continued pushing Harleen along, walking faster now.

“You got someplace better to be? Sounds like someone’s throwing a party upstairs. Am I invited?”

“Sorry, your invitation must have gotten lost in the --”

“Tasha!”

Harleen turned with Romanoff to see Clint Barton jogging around the last corner they’d turned, bow carried loosely in one hand.

“Change of plans,” he said, catching up to them. “Fury needs you up top. I can take Crazypants the rest of the way.”

“ _ Rude _ ,” Harleen mouthed. Both agents ignored her.

“Is it…?”

“We think so. Same lab. Tony’s flying up now to check it out.”

They both looked suspiciously at Harleen, like she had something to do with whatever was going on in the lab upstairs, and she blinked innocently at them in return.

“Fine,” Romanoff said, releasing Harleen’s shoulder. “Meet us up there soon as you can.”

“Soon as I can,” he agreed, and Romanoff took off sprinting the way they’d just come.

“Save a piece of cake for me!” Harleen called after her, then smiled sweetly up at Barton. “Agent Romanoff and I were just talking about you,” she informed him. “Interesting that Director Fury would rather have  _ her _ with him upstairs, while you get to...”

She trailed off as he took her by the elbow. His hand was colder than it had been in the conference room, and she didn’t feel any calluses. Her eyes widened and she inhaled deeply through flaring nostrils as she turned to look up at his square face, which stared straight ahead down the hall he was leading her along.

“You have  _ some nerve, you ARROGA -- mmph! _ ”

His hand clapped over her mouth before she could get a good yell going, and steered her sharply around a corner that she was sure didn’t lead back to her cell. Harleen kept shouting muffled abuse into the hand anyway as he slung the bow onto his back and picked her bodily up by the waist to carry her, kicking and squirming, through a stairwell door.

He dropped her on the landing there and pushed her up against the wall, still covering her mouth with a smooth hand that smelled like ozone and faraway worlds.

“Are you  _ quite _ finished?” hissed the voice she knew all too well through lips she didn’t.

“No, I am not damn well finished!” Harleen dropped her voice to a shrill whisper as soon as he released her mouth. “I would slap you if I could! You think you can just stroll in and play the knight in shining armor, after what you did!? You’ve got another think coming, you --”

“I came for you, did I not?” he interrupted, a familiar twinkle in eyes that weren’t a cold enough blue to be familiar.

“You came for your precious pointy stick! You think I didn’t figure out they transported it here from S.T.A.T.I.O.N. after they heard you got out? I just happened to be on the way, and don’t you tell me you’d have bothered if I wasn’t! And by the way, Mr. L, I didn’t  _ need  _ you to bother -- I ain’t your damsel to rescue.”

He didn’t deny the accusation. “Am I to assume, then, that you had a cunning plan for escape already in motion?”

Harleen snorted contemptuously. “Of course I did.”

“Lord of all Liars, Harleen,” he reminded her, sounding scornful. “I  _ am _ aware when that includes you. Now, it will not be long until Black Widow realizes she has been deceived, and I would rather --”

“Why  _ did  _ you bother coming back for me?” she interrupted softly. She didn’t ask why he’d left her to begin with. She didn’t want to know.

“Would you believe me if I said I missed you?”

“I wouldn’t believe you if you said the sun rises in the east and the Hudson stinks in summer.”

Loki didn’t seem to be listening. He pulled the scepter, no longer concealed as Hawkeye’s bow, off his back. The stone embedded in it glowed a bright, surreal blue. “Do you trust me?” he asked earnestly.

Harleen couldn’t help the cackle of laughter that slipped out. It echoed loudly up and down the stairwell, but there was no returning sound to imply they’d been heard. “What are you, a Disney prince now?” she asked. “Fuck  _ no _ , I don’t trust you.”

Even disguised as the serious-looking archer, Loki still managed to turn the charm in his smile up to 100 watts. “Will you come with me anyway?”

Harleen twisted her mouth, trying hard not to meet the smile with one of her own. “Why the hell would I run away with you  _ again? _ It didn’t exactly go well for me last time.”

Loki shrugged easily. “Because you want to.”

“You sound awfully damn sure of yourself.”

He sighed briefly, as if annoyed that she was going to make him spell it out for her, then abruptly dropped the illusion to look intently at her with his own face. “This is what you’ve  _ always _ wanted, Harleen, since long before we met. Why else would have been so quick to abandon all you knew last night? You tire of the familiar more rapidly than you can even begin to move beyond it, and all you’ve ever craved is the opportunity to pursue the unknown.

“It’s true that you may find your own way from this place without my assistance, but how long will you remain here before you do? Days, weeks? Could you tolerate even another hour? And what then? You said yourself that there is no life you might create for yourself that would satisfy you.”

Damn him. This was  _ exactly _ what she’d known he would do, use her own words against her, turn everything she said back onto her, and the worst part was that he was exactly right.

“I can offer you so much more than you would ever find on your own,” he persisted. Harleen tried not to listen, but she couldn’t even pull her eyes away from his, much less block out his words. “Things you never dreamed to be possible, entire  _ worlds _ you’ve never known. Come with me, and there will be no door locked to you, no smaller minds to hold you from whatever you might wish to explore.”

He had her, and he knew it. Harleen swallowed, very conscious of her own breathing. “How do I know you’re not going to just drop me again the second it’s convenient?” It was barely a token resistance.They both already knew she was caught no matter what he said, and she already knew the answer before he’d even smiled winningly at her again.

“You don’t.”

Still, she couldn’t make it that easy for him. “Get these cuffs off me, and I’ll  _ think _ about it.”

“Oh, no,” he said roguishly, grabbing the back of her head and pulling her forward to kiss her hard. “I rather like the idea of keeping you restrained for now.”

Then, without giving her a chance to argue, he wrapped his other arm around her, still holding the scepter. The stone flashed brightly enough to blind her for a split second, and the stairwell was flooded with blue light and then vanished.


	15. Chapter 15

“So, this is Asgard.”

Harleen swallowed, hoping her voice sounded normal. She wasn’t sure if the vertigo clenching her stomach was left over from the trip there, which had felt like everything flipped itself upside down and then righted itself in a fraction of a second, or because Loki had chosen to deposit them on a balcony overlooking a waterfall that plummeted down into empty space.

“My summer palace, on one of the further edges of our realm,” he agreed. Now that she had the time to look at him closely, she noticed he seemed to have found a way to remove the collar since they’d parted ways the night before.

_Was it only last night? Holy shit._ A lot had happened in the last twelve hours. At least S.H.I.E.L.D. had guaranteed she’d gotten a couple hours of sleep, but Harleen could tell she was mostly still running on endorphins and catecholamine neurotransmitters. She wasn’t sure when she would crash, but knew she’d crash hard when she did.

“Must be nice to have a palace for every season,” she teased Loki.

“It was originally intended for Thor,” he said absently, staring out across the view. “But he mislikes remaining far from the city for long. I prefer the perspective that distance brings. I do not believe he even noticed when I claimed it for my own.”

Harleen followed his gaze. It was easier to focus on the distant peaks and falls than it was to look directly at the one below them. She could just make out the sweeping golden lines of the city he mentioned at the center of the horizon. Looking back at Loki’s face, she caught a faraway, almost bittersweet look in his ice-blue eyes. A slightly curling lock of black hair had fallen in front of his ear, and if she hadn’t still been handcuffed, Harleen might have reached up to brush it back into place.

_Stop that. You’re still mad at him, remember?_

Loki pulled himself out of his reverie and looked back at Harleen in time to catch her watching him. She pointedly turned her head to examine the architecture of the balcony. It was really quite beautiful, and she found she didn’t actually have to pretend to be fascinated by the ancient marble and the complex geometric patterns picked out in gold. A vine-framed archway behind them opened onto what looked like a bedroom, lavishly appointed with colorful tapestries and heavy metallic furniture.

“Would you like to see the rest?” Even refusing to look at him, she could still see the indulgent smile on Loki’s face when he spoke.

“Are there guided tours and a gift shop?”

“I’ll give you the tour myself in a little while,” he told her, lifting her chin with slender fingers to pull her face back towards his.

“Why not now?” Harleen asked, knowing the answer full well as put his hands on her waist, looking at her like she was an especially ripe and juicy apple.

“You are adopting the façade of ignorance again, Harleen, and it does not suit you,” he informed her haughtily, moving relentlessly forward so she was forced to take backward steps into the bedroom.

“What if I haven’t forgiven you yet?” she asked.

“I do not believe I require your forgiveness.” He had his mouth on hers now, nipping at her lips between words, and it took all of Harleen’s self-restraint to keep from kissing him back. “You are mine to do as I like with.”

“I am not!” Harleen halted just before they reached the canopied bed and jerked her head back from his, refusing to be pushed back any further. “I told you before; I don’t belong to _anybody_ , least of all you. You get that through your head right now, Mr. L, because I am _not_ yours or anyone’s.”

“As you like,” he said indifferently, with one of his infuriating ‘agree to disagree’ shrugs. Harleen wanted to smack him, but since she still had the stupid cuffs on, she aimed another kick at his ankle. He avoided it deftly and hooked his foot around hers while it was still in the air, knocking her backwards onto the bed.

Harleen landed with a squeak and Loki followed her down, moving kisses and little bites down her neck while he quickly unbuttoned her jeans and pulled the zipper down.

“Don’t you _dare_ \--”

“Hush, kitten.” He distracted her mouth with his, and Harleen couldn’t help kissing him back this time, tongues twining around each other while he slipped his hands under her back and worked them down into her panties. Harleen arched her back and lifted her ass up off the bed so he could pull her jeans and underwear down together.

Loki left them around her knees and roughly jerked her shirt up to expose her breasts, then broke off the kiss so he could move down and tease her right nipple with his tongue. Encouraged by her moans, he nipped it gently with his teeth, then kept going down over her ribs and stomach with another trail of kisses and bites.

Pushing her thighs apart, he continued down between her legs. Harleen inhaled sharply at the touch of his tongue and spread her knees as far as they could go, still tangled in the jeans. Loki reached his left hand up to play with and tease the breast he’d neglected before and sucked on the first two fingers of the right hand before sliding them into her into her, hooked slightly at just the right angle. He let his tongue linger just outside, flicking his tongue across her clit faster than she’d have thought possible.

“Oh holy fuck, _yesss_ ,” Harleen moaned. _So_ that’s _why they call him ‘Silver-Tongued,’_ she thought wickedly.

The man was a goddamned expert. After centuries of practice, she supposed he’d ought to be. Over and over again, he brought her just up to the brink of orgasm, then eased off and let her subside before driving her, gasping and swearing, to the edge again. Hands bound beneath her, there was nothing Harleen could do about it but writhe in ecstasy as he led her up, then first growl and later scream in dissatisfaction as he let her back down.

At some point, she managed to kick her legs out of her jeans and had them wrapped around his back as he toyed with her, squeezing him tightly whenever he made her convulse with pleasure or frustration.

“Holy shit, Loki, let me come,” she begged.

“Say please,” he retorted, his face still buried between her thighs. The vibrations of his words sent interesting tingles up into her.

“Fuck you.”

Harleen felt his head start to pull away and his fingers slide out, and immediately abandoned all pretense of dignity. “Oh fuck, don’t stop, pleasepleasepleasepleasepleaseplease, Loki, please don’t stop!”

He stopped moving away from her, but didn’t start eating her out again. Harleen could just see Loki’s eyes glinting up at her from between her legs. “Say you belong to me,” he commanded softly.

“'You belong to me,'” she quoted obediently back at him, lowering her chin to grin mischievously down. He tweaked her nipple hard in retaliation, making her gasp sharply again, and began slowly to resume probing her with his tongue.

“Say you are mine,” he ordered, making more interesting vibrations.

“You…” Harleen trailed off into a moan as his fingers began quickly working her again. He pulled his left hand down to join the right and held her apart, one thumb massaging her clit as he alternated fingers and tongue to drive her back up again until her legs convulsed again around him, head thrown backwards with sweat beading across her forehead, toes curling tight in on themselves and her fingers twisted in the blanket underneath her.

There he held her, moving just fast enough to keep her from falling into release on either side of satisfaction. “Say it,” he growled.

“I’m yours,” she babbled, almost beyond words. “Oh fuck, I am, I really am. I belong to you. You -- oh, holy _shit_ , Loki, do that again -- you own me. Make me yours. Please, please, please, oh god, please make me --”

When he finally let her, Harleen came so hard she almost blacked out, screaming loud enough she wouldn’t have been surprised if they heard her in the distant golden city. She collapsed back into the deep, soft bed, panting hard and feeling like a marionette with cut strings. Through nearly-closed eyes, she could see Loki disentangling himself from her legs to stand.

Licking his lips with a small, wickedly satisfied smile, he reminded her of nothing so much as a sleek black cat just finished gorging himself on stolen cream. Moving around the corner of the bed, Loki leaned over to brush a kiss across her forehead, and Harleen was just barely conscious of pulling her legs up to curl up on her side.

The crash she’d known had been coming hit her like a cannonball, and she was asleep before she remembered he hadn’t even uncuffed her yet.

  


The handcuffs were gone when Harleen woke up. So was her shirt, for that matter, but she found it difficult to care. She felt better-rested than she had been in months, and she stretched luxuriously, noting absently that a velvety-soft dark green blanket had been pulled over her at some point while she slept. It looked like some kind of pelt from an enormous, green-furred beast she couldn’t name, and it was ridiculously comfortable.

With a wide yawn, Harleen considered nestling back down into sleep again, but then her stomach complained loudly, and she was suddenly aware of the small black hole growing there. Not counting the bubblegum she’d gleefully extorted from the Avengers, Harleen realized that she genuinely couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten anything; it had certainly been more than a full day, and the appetite she’d been losing over the last few months had come back with a vengeance.

Harleen slipped off the bed, wrapping the fur around herself, and padded to the balcony’s archway to listen to the waterfall and look at the sky. Stars were just beginning to appear through dusky purple nebulae, and she suspected that if she stayed and looked carefully, she’d find they were the same stars that had shone over Loki’s illusory ballroom.

Speaking of which… where had her Mr. L gone off to? A brief fear of abandonment curled itself around Harleen’s stomach. She would absolutely not put it past the trickster god to leave her to wake up in an alien world, in a bed he’d only claimed was his, and then fuck off, never to be seen again.

No point in worrying about it until she got her bearings, though. Turning back into the room, she was unsurprised to note that her jeans and underwear had vanished from where she’d kicked them onto the floor, presumably having disappeared to wherever her shirt went.

Loki’s scepter was also unaccounted for. Had he had it with him when they appeared on the balcony? Harleen couldn’t remember, but then, she’d been rather distracted at the time.

She scanned the bedroom for exits and found two sets of identical double doors, both made out sheets of some kind of beaten gold or bronze, one on the far side of the bed, and one across from its foot.

The doors on the far side of the room turned out to lead to a -- well, ‘walk-in closet’ was far too small a term. The phrase ‘dressing chamber’ supplied itself, probably out of some distant memory of something Austen or Malory, so Harleen went with that. Nearly everything in it ran towards green, gold, and black, which reassuringly confirmed that the place actually _did_ belong to Loki; the man did so love to stick to a theme.

If it all hadn’t been so painstakingly organized, Harleen would have accused Loki of having a serious hoarding problem: it looked like he’d raided the entire stock of multiple Renaissance fairs, a handful of turn-of-the-century department stores, and a fair few Hollywood costume shops to fill the chamber. She wondered what the point was, when he could illusion himself up anything he wanted to wear, but there was no accounting for vanity with some people. _He probably considers himself a refined collector of sartorial oddities from across time and space, or something overly grandiose like that_ , Harleen thought with a little eye-roll.

Leaving the blanket on the floor, Harleen decided to help herself. It was the morning-after prerogative, after all, even if the morning in question was closer to evening. She wondered idly, as she ran her hands along the racks and shelves, how long she’d been asleep, and how Asgard’s day/night cycle compared to Earth’s.

Not all of the clothing was menswear, which led to some entertaining mental images, but in the name of tradition, she found herself a men’s button-up, black with gold buttons, that fell almost to her knees. Harleen put it on, rolled the sleeves up, and kept exploring.

The second set of doors opened onto a covered walkway with solid wall on one side and open pillars on the other. Harleen stayed close to the wall side, trailing her right hand along it, and decided to stick to the right when it connected back to the palace at an intersection on the other side.

It was both comforting and surreal, both exciting and somehow faintly ominous, wandering aimlessly through the Asgardian palace. It had a lonely, abandoned feel, which she supposed made sense if Loki had been trapped on Midgard -- _Earth_ , she corrected herself -- since May, and who knew when he had last visited his ‘summer palace’ -- _ugh, so pretentious_ \-- before then.

There was almost a faintly uncanny sense to the architecture and decorations, so close to being familiar and earthly, but somehow stopping just short of normality, blending medieval aesthetics and scifi futurisms in disorienting ways. Sticking her nose into dusty rooms at random, creeping along corridors with lengthening shadows, never sure what would be around the next turning, it almost felt like something from a storybook.

_But does that make me Beauty or Bluebeard’s bride?_

For the first time, Harleen thought to wonder where Loki had gotten his source material for the gory haunted house he’d tried to scare her with -- _be fair, Harley_ \-- that he’d successfully scared her with back at S.H.I.E.L.D. It didn’t seem so far beyond the realm of possibility that any of these doors could be hiding a room full of dead women.

 _Be bold, be bold, but not too bold, lest your heart’s blood should run cold._ The fairy tale refrain wandered unbidden into Harleen’s mind. It wasn’t from Bluebeard, she didn’t think, but something similar she couldn’t remember the name of.

“Be as bold as I motherfucking want to be,” she muttered aloud, lifted her chin haughtily, and continued wandering wherever she pleased through the empty, lonely palace.


	16. Chapter 16

A spiral staircase took Harleen down through another open arch that showed a warm, flickering glow at the end of the next corridor. Propelled onwards by the smell of food as much by the encouraging light, she padded down the corridor and stopped in the next doorway.

It opened onto a circular room with a domed ceiling and a thriving firepit in the center. More than half of the wall space was given over to arched windows looking out into a garden, a gleaming bench running the length of the curved wall underneath them. Opposite the fire, a laden table sat flanked by two chairs, apparently waiting for her.

Harleen almost made a beeline for the food, but stayed where she was when she spotted Loki sitting in the window, leaning against a pillar and staring out across the garden at the golden city in the distance. One long leg was bent up in front of him, the other stretched out along the window seat. He had his arm propped up on the bent leg, idly toying with a half-eaten apple he seemed to have forgotten he was holding.

He must also have changed his clothes at some point, or else was pretending to, with soft black leather breeches and a loose green tunic that looked a lot more comfortable than either the S.H.I.E.L.D. prison uniform or his usual elaborate get-up. She folded her arms and leaned against the side of the doorframe, a fond smile slowly crossing her face as she watched Loki turn the apple around and around, lost in thought.

_ The fuck is wrong with you, Harley? Not five minutes ago, you were perfectly ready to believe he’s a serial killer, and now you’re going all gooey-eyed just because -- _

“Rest well?”

The voice came from right behind her, cold breath creeping across the back of her neck, and the Loki in the window flickered and vanished. Harleen yelped and whirled around, fists raised, to find the real Loki, identical in every way to his counterpart, laughing unrepentantly at the expression on her face.

“Son of a _bitch_ , Loki” she fumed, all traces of fondness for him disappearing as fast as they’d come. “The hell did you do that for?! I nearly decked you!”

“I would see you try,” he taunted her, so Harleen did. He caught her fist easily before it connected, brushed his lips across her fingers, then pulled her in and kissed her deeply.

“You can’t seduce me into forgiving you  _ every _ time you piss me off,” she told him stubbornly, trying to ignore the melty feeling in her knees.

“It seems to have been effective thus far,” he pointed out with a grin. Then his smile softened and he gestured at the table. “But perhaps this once I can buy your forgiveness in other ways. I would imagine you’re quite hungry.”

Harleen stuck her nose in the air with all the dignity she could muster. “Fortunately for you, yes, I am,” she told him, sweeping loftily to the table and taking a seat. “How long have I been out, anyway?”

“Something more than ten hours, I believe,” he estimated, drawing up the chair across from her and carefully selecting a real apple for himself.

“Hot damn,” Harleen mumbled around a mouthful of some kind of warm, spicy meat pie. “The interstellar jet lag is real.”

She washed the pie down with a tart, syrupy juice -- pomegranate, maybe? -- and tried to imagine where the food had come from. She hadn’t seen any sign of servants or staff during her wandering, but it was difficult to picture the self-proclaimed Future Ruler of the Nine Realms doing anything as mundane as cooking something.

An unbidden mental image of Loki wearing nothing but a frilly apron popped into her head, and Harleen quickly put the juice down before she accidentally snorted it.

“Something amusing?” he asked, raising an eyebrow at her smothered giggles.

Harleen elected not to answer that, at least not directly. “Do you have any idea how long I went without laughing before you showed up? Not really, anyhow, not like I meant it.” She paused to cram the last few bites of pie into her mouth, and continued. “ _Years!_ I wanted to, sometimes; it’s not like nothing funny ever happened. You should have seen this one so-called supervillain...” Harleen trailed off, realizing she was getting off-topic.

Taking an orange, she scrunched up her nose and put on a nasal voice, even higher-pitched than she normally spoke, while she found a small knife among the dishes and began peeling the fruit. “But I had to be _professional_ , or else I might  _ offend  _ somebody, or I might not be taken  _ seriously  _ as a scientist.” She almost sliced her thumb open, vehemently attacking the orange with each of the offending words.

“And then you come along with your stupid jokes and your smartass comments, and you looked right the fuck through me, so there was no point in hiding it anyway.” Loki was being unusually quiet, so Harleen glanced at him, but he seemed content to sit and watch her talk with an unreadable expression, rolling the apple back and forth in his hands without eating it.

Harleen hated when she couldn’t get anything from his face, so she kept talking to distract herself.

“I remember the first time you finally got me to break, with your impression of Thor being chased by the -- what did you call it? -- the baby bilgesnipe.” She grinned to herself at the memory. “I was trying  _ so hard _ not to laugh, and I wouldn’t have, except then you just  _ looked _ at me, and I  _ knew _ you knew how much I was cracking up inside, and I couldn’t help it anymore.”

She looked up across the table to meet Loki’s eyes. It was hard to tell, but it looked like there might be the smallest of smiles tugging at one corner of his mouth. “You know, you’re the only person who’s ever been able to get more out of me than I could get from them.”

“It’s a gift,” he said modestly, and she rolled her eyes as she leaned back in her chair and putting an orange slice in her mouth. She remembered the cut in her tongue a split second too late, but didn’t feel the sting of the citrus like she expected to. Instead, she realized, swallowing the bite and prodding her tongue with her teeth, it seemed to have fully healed already. So had her skinned palms and bruised arms, she noticed, now that she thought to look for them. She hadn’t hurt at all since she’d awoken in Loki’s bed.

Harleen looked curiously at him, but if it was his doing, he was keeping his peace about it. “You’re being unusually nice to me,” she commented suspiciously, going for an indirect allusion to the mysteriously vanishing injuries -- not to mention everything else he’d done since abandoning her to S.H.I.E.L.D.’s tender mercies. Was it an apology, his feeding her and letting her rest? That didn’t seem like him.

“Am I?” he asked vaguely, polishing an invisible spot off the apple. Harleen narrowed her eyes, but decided not to push it. Maybe it wouldn’t be the end of the world if she decided to just shut up and be grateful for once.

She was in a giving mood, anyway. It was nice, just sitting by the fire with a full stomach, listening to the water falling and a few of the evening’s last birds sleepily calling from the garden. The rigid little candy-coated bubble of anger she’d been nursing since she awoke in Stark Tower hadn’t popped, but it had at least shrunk in on itself, retreating to the far back of her mind, satiated for the moment. Delicious food and mind-blowing orgasms were good for that.

Harleen picked up her goblet of juice again for another sip and ran a finger lazily around its rim, staring down at the firelight dancing off the liquid inside. In the quiet and the stillness, that irritating, overly analytical voice was beginning to creep back in, the one that she could never quite silence, only distract and avoid and drown out before it drove her mad with its relentless questions.

What kind of birds were in the garden? Were they the same kinds there were on Earth, or unique to the Asgardian biome? How big was the planet, anyway, and did it really classify as a planet, or some other sort of celestial body that science -- at least human science -- hadn’t named yet? How were there stars both above and below, and what was supporting the land while the water tumbled off into space? What were the odds that its atmosphere was breathable for her, or that it would naturally produce something as familiar as apples and oranges, or that Asgardians had evolved almost identically to humans? Or were they really gods, like some claimed, who had created humanity in their image? And in that case...

On and on it went. Harleen slowly went from thoughtfully frowning into the goblet to scowling fiercely at it, her finger circling faster and faster around its rim in time with the onslaught from her own mind, on and on, faster and faster, around and around, turning, turning, like a planet, like a ballroom, like a half-eaten apple, until --

The goblet was plucked neatly from her hand and set back down on the table. Harleen looked up to find Loki standing over her. The trailing thread of the thoughts she’d been unwillingly chasing spun around itself and escaped her like a stage magician vanishing into his cape, and she blinked up at Loki before taking his offered hand with a blithe smile and rising from her seat, threading her arm through Loki’s.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> EDIT: Updates are now regularly scheduled for Fridays. Silly filler art from my sick week [here](https://preview.ibb.co/diP6wS/IMG_20180219_112941.jpg).


	17. Chapter 17

Loki looked very slightly taken aback by the sudden gesture of affection. Humming a little to herself, Harleen thought smugly that maybe he wasn’t  _ quite  _ as able to predict her thoughts as he liked to think. God alone knew  _ she _ couldn’t predict her own thoughts, and it was just unfair if he could.

“What’s that for?” she demanded, noticing that he was giving her another one of his long, appraising scrutinies.

“Merely reassessing previous miscalculations in light of new data,” he informed her mysteriously.

Loki was clearly in a vague and superior mood. Harleen knew from infuriating experience that there was no getting anything out of him when he went like that, so she stuck her tongue out at him and changed the subject. “So, what’s next?”

“Next? I believe I promised you a tour.”

Harleen frowned a little again, studying his face as they walked back up the spiral stairs. That hadn’t been what she’d meant, and she got the sense that he knew that. “No, I mean now that you --”

“Now that I what?” he interrupted, looking innocent.

Harleen looked harder. No, there was definitely something there. He  _ knew  _ she wanted to know what his plans were for the scepter and the Avengers and world domination or whatever the fuck he meant to do, but he was very carefully, very pointedly avoiding the subject.

That was interesting. It couldn’t just mean that he wanted to keep his plans to himself, because he’d already proven that he was much better than  _ that  _ subtly at keeping her away from subjects he didn’t want to talk about. It was theoretically possible that she had simply finally gotten better at reading him, but Harleen was sure that -- this time, at least -- if she’d noticed his conversational parry, it was because he  _ wanted _ her to notice, and he wanted her to extrapolate something from there.

What was she missing? Harleen thrived on the puzzle of it. The mystery gave her a distraction, a single problem she could let the back of her mind chew over so it would leave her in peace to enjoy Loki’s company.

Whatever it was, it was clear that attacking the subject directly would get her nowhere, so Harleen changed the subject again. “Now that you have me helplessly in your merciless clutches,” she teased as they turned down a hall she hadn’t explored yet, grinning wickedly up at him with her tongue between her teeth.

Loki raised his eyebrows at her. “‘Helpless’ is not precisely a word I would use to describe you,” he pointed out, sounding amused.

“Oh, but I am,” Harleen assured him. She widened her eyes and put an exaggerated quaver in her voice as she continued, “All alone, in a strange and far-off world, held captive by the wicked god of lies deceit.” He liked it when she used the g-word; she could tell. She liked seeing him like it. “Whatever is to become of me?”

Loki turned and put an outstretched hand on the corridor wall next to her to bar her path forward. Harleen bit her lower lip with a smile and put her back to the wall, letting him step in towards her.

“That’s something you should have considered before you agreed to run away with him,” Loki put his other hand on the wall beside her so she was locked in between his arms.

“Poor me,” Harleen murmured, resting her hands on his chest and lifting up on her toes to kiss his neck. “I guess I’ll just have to accept my fate.” She let one hand wander down over his breeches and stroked her fingers along the hardening lump there. “The first stop on this tour of yours doesn’t happen to be the bedroom again, does it?” she whispered in his ear, biting at his earlobe.

“No bedroom,” he snarled, brushing her hand aside to free the length of his pale cock from the breeches. “Now.”

Harleen laughed delightedly as he hoisted her up against the wall the same way he had when they were making out in the elevator. “Loki like pretty girl,” she mocked him in a caveman voice, wrapping her bare legs around his waist. “Loki want fuck  _ now! _ ”

He freed one hand to cuff the side of her head a little harder than necessary, but she was distracted by any complaint she might have had when he plunged into her. Harleen gave out a strangled little cry of surprise and ecstasy and gripped him by both his shoulders, nails clenching through his tunic as he thrust up into her over and over.

He pulled her away from the wall, and Harleen tightened her legs around him to drive herself deeper onto his cock. Viciously tearing open the shirt she wore and letting gold buttons bounce and scatter across the floor, Loki bit deep into the upper swell of her exposed breast and teased out an angry bruise there.

Harleen moaned, sinking backwards as she was suspended in the air. He dug the fingers of both hands into her ass and yanked her back up again, and Harleen flung her arms around his neck, digging her teeth into the curve of his shoulder.

Loki growled softly into her ear and intensified his pace, eliciting tiny gasps from her with every thrust. She twined her fingers in his hair and pulled, making him growl more loudly and slam her back against the wall to fuck her harder. Harleen shrieked in delight and ran her hands around his head to cup his chin, frame his face, drink in his features with her fingertips. Her thumb slipped over the corner of his mouth and he parted his lips to suck on it, bite it, run his tongue around it.

Harleen met his eyes and never wanted to look anywhere else, lost in their cold-burning blue. They had always seen through her, but now they drove farther into her than ever, piercing her as deeply as he himself did. It was the way he looked at her when he softly snarled, “Mine,” as much as anything, that made her shudder bonelessly and involuntarily slacken her grip around his shoulders, crying out softly with pleasure.

He loosened her grip on her as well, sliding free from her and letting her slip down the wall. Without waiting to be told, Harleen dropped to her knees before him and eagerly wrapped her lips around his cock, and running her tongue all around its length to lick and suck away the mess she’d made.

Clenching his fingers in her hair, Loki pulled her forward up along his shaft, Harleen opening her mouth as wide as it would go to take him in. With a brief, strangled grunt, he came, the hot liquid running down the back of her throat in spurts.

Harleen slumped back against the wall, dragging one sleeve across her mouth and moaning softly with the heavy-lidded pleasure of afterglow. Loki sank down to the floor to join her; he sat with his back to the wall, one leg crooked up before him, like he’d pretended to sit in the window.

Harleen knew she must be a mess, and didn’t care. It had probably been two days by now since she’d brushed her hair, still bunched up in the tangled remains of her pigtails. Her stolen shirt lay ripped open, leaving nothing to the imagination. Its sleeves had come unrolled and were too long for her arms by several inches.

The bruise on her breast had blossomed into a violent shade of reddish-purple, and Harleen gazed down at it, thinking somewhat deliriously that it was the loveliest thing she’d ever seen. She shook one hand free from its sleeve and poked it with satisfaction, then leaned over sideways to rest her head on Loki’s propped-up knee.

He started slightly, then, jerkily, hesitatingly, lifted his hand to brush her hair away from her face and run his fingers through it. Harleen closed her eyes and breathed deeply, like a contented child. 

“See?” she chided sleepily, smiling with her eyes still closed. “Now you’ve gone and ravaged me again, taking advantage of my innocence. I told you I was helpless.”

Loki snorted quietly. “I believe I’d find myself even less likely to describe you as ‘innocent’ than ‘helpless.’”

“I  _ totally _ am!” Harleen protested, twisting around to lie with her back propped up against his leg and grin up at him. “Or I was, anyhow; I was a good girl before  _ you _ came along. You’re a bad influence, Mr. L.”

“I rather doubt that you were,” he mused. The remark didn’t seem particularly pointed, but Harleen found herself wondering what he knew about her. She assumed as a matter of course that he could have gotten his hands on her S.H.I.E.L.D. file somehow if he was interested in reading it, but there were things that even S.H.I.E.L.D. didn’t know, things that  _ nobody _ knew. Harleen had seen to that. There was no possible way that even Loki could have found out, but all the same…

He glanced down to catch her watching him suspiciously again, and gave her an exaggerated version of her own look. Harleen rolled her eyes and pushed up off his leg to shakily stand.

“You can give me the grand tour another time,” she said, holding out a hand to help Loki up. He ignored it, rising elegantly in a single motion on his own. “I am in desperate need of a shower, if such a thing exists here.”


	18. Chapter 18

There was not, in fact, a shower in Loki’s palace, but there _was_ an ostentatiously large bath, and Harleen made full use of it before rejoining Loki in the bedroom. She didn’t think she’d be able to sleep again so soon after waking up, but the events of the past few days were still catching up with her, and Loki’s bed was even more comfortable with him in it.

Of course, he was gone again when she woke up the next morning. Why wouldn’t he be? Harleen sighed heavily and rolled her eyes as she raided his extensive wardrobe again, then wandered back down to the rotunda, where she found a fresh bowl of fruit and a note written in elegant cursive script.

Harleen picked up an apple and took a bite while she read the note.

_Kitten,_

_I will return. Don’t make trouble. Don’t touch anything in the armory. Don’t remove anything from the library. Enjoy the aviary, but please leave the hawk alone._

_\- L_

“How would I even make trouble when there’s no one else here?” she asked out loud with her mouth full while she turned the note over to see if there were any clues to where he'd gone on the back.

_You’ll find a way._

“Hmph.”

Leaving the note and taking the apple, Harleen wandered back off into the palace to guide _herself_ on the tour he’d promised her. She’d already seen most of the upstairs of this wing and it had held little of interest, so she started downstairs and stumbled across the armory in short order.

Swords and axes, spears and staves, weapons throughout history and plenty that weren’t even remotely Earthly decorated the walls and sat lined in racks. Harleen had had friends who’d wet themselves over this display, but historical weaponry had never really been her area, so she munched her apple and ran her finger idly over the blades and hilts with only mild interest until she came across the scepter mounted in pride of place on a pedestal at the back of the room.

“So this is where you disappeared to,” she said aloud to it, reaching out to lift the weapon experimentally.

Her hand passed right through it and snagged instead on what felt like a razor-sharp cord. There was an ominous click, and Harleen dropped to the ground just barely in time to avoid a pair of daggers crossing in the air where her head had just been.

“Oh, very cute!” she snapped, hissing in pain and squeezing her palm around the shallow cut that had been sliced there by the cord. She retrieved her apple from where it had rolled away and stalked out of the armory, muttering under her breath something along the lines of, “ _goddamn Indiana Jones bullshit, swear to god, who even does that anyway?”_ but her temper didn’t last. The lower floor of the palace was much more interesting than the shuttered bedrooms and sitting rooms above, and there was plenty to distract herself with.

The library, when she found it, was every bit as phenomenal as she’d assumed it would be, a full two stories of overcrowded shelves and plush armchairs joined by sweeping staircases. Harleen paused in the doorway to take it in. “If any of the furniture starts singing, I swear to god I am _walking_ to Midgard from here,” she announced out loud.

Fortunately, the library kept its peace, but she soon found to her dismay that most of the books were written in what she could only assume to be ancient Nordic runes. There was a small Midgardian section, however, with a single shelf of English-language texts, although most ran along a fairly predictable Scandinavian theme. Harleen leafed through a few of those, tucked some interesting-looking volumes under her arm, kept wandering.

After another hour or so of poking around, Harleen was getting hungry again, so she brought her stack of books back to the rotunda and settled onto the window seat there, moving the fruit bowl to within easy arm’s reach.

The morning so far had given her plenty of time to think over Loki’s oddly overt reluctance to discuss his plans the night before, and she was beginning to have some ideas about what it meant. Before she settled on a theory, though, she wanted to do a little background research and confirm some half-remembered things Loki had mentioned in passing during their sessions in the S.H.I.E.L.D. facility a lifetime ago.

She wished mildly that she’d had a chance to get her reading glasses from her quarters there before leaving forever, but their absence wasn’t a huge loss. Her prescription had always been a fairly weak one, the glasses more a part of her carefully-maintained mask than a strict necessity. She could do without.

Crossing her legs up on the bench, Harleen began with a children’s collection of Scandinavian fairy tales, then worked her way up through more academic volumes on Norse mythology and an English translation of the _Prose Edda_ , leaving books scattered around her on the bench, sitting open to certain pages of interest and she rifled through them.

She was contemplatively popping grapes into her mouth and poring over a particularly fascinating dissection of Ásatrúistic virtues when Loki appeared in the doorway, taking in her collection of stolen books with wry amusement.

“You’ve been busy,” he commented, and Harleen grinned across the room at him, putting her current book down and drawing another that she’d already been through into her lap.

“Boredom is the mind-killer,” she informed him cheerfully. “Don’t worry; I didn’t cause any trouble.”

Loki eyed the books and the way she was favoring her right hand and lifted his eyes to the ceiling as if praying for patience. “Please tell me you’ve at least left Hábrók in peace.”

“Huh?” Harleen looked blankly up at him, swallowing another grape. “Oh, the bird. Yeah, he’s fine. Wouldn’t talk to me, the meanie. Your peacocks were surprisingly polite, though.”

“I suppose I should simply be grateful that the walls are still standing,” he sighed, and came over to make room for himself on the bench beside her. “Discover anything of interest?”

“Just reading up on your friends and family.” Harleen gave him a significant sidelong glance and let her thumb fall with purposeful carelessness on the open page in front of her, just under the heading **_Heimdall_**. “And you, for that matter,” she continued briskly. “Did you really turn into a mare and give birth to an eight-legged horse?”

Loki glanced with apparent disinterest at the page and twitched his chin the barest fraction of an inch. If she hadn’t been looking for it, Harleen wouldn’t have recognized the gesture as the nod it was.

“You should know better than to believe everything you read,” he scolded irritably. “Sturla’s son has much to answer for.”

“So you _didn’t_ once convince Thor that wearing a wedding dress and pretending to be his own mother was the only possible way steal Mjolnir back from the frost giants?” Harleen asked with a grin, putting the book aside and scooting closer to him on the bench. “Because that sounds just a _little_ bit like something you would do.”

Loki smirked, kicking his legs out in front of him and folding his arms behind his head as he leaned back against the closed window. “I did not say the tales were _entirely_ inaccurate. And what a lovely bride my brother made that day, too. I near weeped.”

“I'm sure it was a beautiful ceremony.” Harleen tucked her feet sideways and leaned comfortably on Loki's chest, picking up another volume at apparent random, this one a coffee table book called _The Treasures of Odin._ She held it open on her knees where Loki could see it without turning his head and leafed through it vaguely without really paying attention to the pages, as if just giving her hands something to do.

“It would have been, had the bride not eaten an entire ox by herself and spent the entire dinner glaring daggers at the groom. I believe I had to speak more quickly that day than any other to explain away her bad manners, and even _I’m_ surprised I convinced Thrym to go through with the wedding.”

Loki plucked the book from Harleen's hands and put it aside without apparently looking at it, then scooped her into his lap. Harleen laughed delightedly and put her arms around his neck like a child, which gave her the chance to glance discreetly down and across from him at the page the book had been open to when Loki took it.

“ _Gungnir, the spear of Odin, always strikes true!_ ” it declared above an artist's interpretation of the weapon and a few “ _Did you know?_ ” bubbles spouting fun facts about mythological spears in other cultures.

Harleen blinked, but didn't let any other sign of surprise cross her face. She'd been anticipating Loki would be going for the Tesseract again, or something else kept in storage in Odin's vault -- not something that, by all accounts, the All-Father kept by his side day and night.

“Making Thor look like a good potential wife? You clearly overcame insurmountable odds,” she teased him.

Loki picked up on her double meaning. “Not so insurmountable,” he mused, settling his arms comfortably around her. “Thrym wanted very badly to believe that what he had long desired was within reach. The easiest lies to believe are those we tell ourselves.”

 _Isn't that the goddamn truth?_ Harleen thought ruefully. She'd either been lying to herself for the past several days, or for her entire life before then, and still wasn't entirely sure which. Maybe both.

Still, Loki seemed confident about his current plans, though Harleen wished it were easier to get more detail from him without risking the possibility that the all-seeing, all-hearing Watcher of Worlds was listening in. She rubbed her thumb absent-mindedly across the cut in her palm, thinking it over.

“Give me that,” Loki scolded, taking her hand. “And do _try_ to desist prying into all you see, if you’re capable of such a thing.” Lost in thought, Harleen barely noticed him uncurling her fingers and murmuring softly over the cut.

From what Loki had mentioned in the past, she got the impression that Heimdall was an intelligent man, but honorable to a fault. After what she’d read, it seemed safe to assume that he would have known the moment they arrived in Asgard, and had likely been checking in on them frequently since. Given that she and Loki had remained undisturbed so far, however, it seemed that Heimdall was waiting to act until he saw clear and indisputable evidence of Loki’s ill intent -- and if Harleen knew her Mr. L at all, he had no intention of revealing that evidence until it was too late.

That must also be why Harleen herself was there, she realized, and why Loki had been more consistently pleasant to her than usual. It had been nice to flatter herself that he enjoyed her company, but it was far more likely to be for the Watcher's benefit.

Loki returning to Asgard alone would have been one thing, but Harleen assumed he didn't exactly make a habit of bringing mortal girls home to see the old estate. Her very presence would give Heimdall pause and make him more likely to hang back and observe. It might even make him think Loki had gone soft, or was at least temporarily too distracted by his new toy to bother making another attempt at the throne.

That was kind of a relief, actually. As much as she'd been ignoring the fact, she knew Loki wouldn't have come back for her if he didn't plan on using her for something; all things considered, being a red herring was a pretty benign use -- not to mention an exceedingly enjoyable one so far, and she had every intention of enjoying herself for as long as it lasted.

“Harley,” he said, as if for the second or third time, and Harleen started in surprise, not sure how long she'd been staring off into space. She liked the way his lips formed the word, glancing across the two syllables one right after the other like a heartbeat or a quick breath in and out, tapping on the ‘r’ so softly it was barely present, his tongue curling around the ‘l’ and then smoothing back out to exhale the ‘e.’

It was becoming dangerous how much she liked the little things he did. This wasn't real and couldn't last, but it was all too easy to forget that when he touched her or looked at her or said her name.

She realized belatedly that she’d gotten lost again and still hadn't answered Loki. “Sorry, what?” she said vaguely, and he gave her an odd look.

“I was inquiring whether you’d like to take a turn about the garden this week,” he repeated. It took her a second to remember that that wasn’t all he’d meant and work out the subtext. A whole week? Not that she minded the vacation or the company, but if he was planning something so bold, wouldn’t he want to get in and out quickly?

“Why not now?” she asked, glancing pointedly out the window to the garden just beyond.

“Are you that anxious to get out of doors?” he asked with a laugh. “I may not have been an _ideal_ host, but I didn’t realize you’d grown so bored already.”

“No,” she replied quickly. Too quickly. Too anxiously. She covered over the slip with a smooth smile. “I’m perfectly capable of entertaining myself.”

“I can see that,” he said with a touch of sourness, looking around again at the mess of books. “To answer your question, the _Melia azedarach_ along the southern path hasn’t quite reached its full bloom. If I can beg your patience for a short time, I believe you’ll find the stroll that much more enjoyable when its blossoms join those of the nutmeg geraniums and the wild parsley that grows nearby. The tyrihjelm a little further down the path is also quite lovely this time of year.”

Before Harleen could even begin untangling whatever that nonsense was supposed to mean on either level, Loki pushed her unceremoniously out of his lap and stood up. Harleen squeaked, but managed to catch herself on the window seat and stood upright with a glare at him.

“‘Would you mind moving, Harley? I think I’d like to get up now,’” she said sarcastically, trying imitate Loki’s voice. “Why, no, Loki, I don’t mind at all,” she continued in her own. “Thank you for asking nicely instead of dumping me on the floor.”

He wasn’t even slightly abashed. “Don’t bother pretending to be offended, kitten,” he scolded in a murmur, slipping a hand around the back of her head and pulling her in close. “You know you’ll forgive me anything.”

 _Godammit,_ she realized, automatically opening her mouth to welcome in his kiss. In spite of everything he was and everything he’d done and all of her better judgement, he was right.


	19. Chapter 19

Once again, Loki was gone the next morning. Harleen honestly wasn’t sure if he ever even slept; so far, he’d made a habit of making sure she was well and truly comatose at night and disappearing by the time she awoke.

This time, though, she’d barely gotten out of bed before finding another note from him. It simply read ‘ _ Please _ ,’ and was resting on top of a stack of neatly folded clothing in her size, including her missing jeans and nightshirt and a soft pair of black flats.  _ Probably didn’t want any more of  _ his _ getting destroyed _ , she thought with a grin.  _ Not that that’s anyone’s fault but his own. _

From a quick rifle through, it looked like he’d found her the same eclectic mix of styles that she’d seen among his own clothes, but in a wider range of colors. Harleen couldn’t help but notice, though, that red predominated, and she wondered whether he’d realized it was her favorite color, or just liked seeing it on her. Either way, she found a red sundress she liked and slipped it over her head as she wandered downstairs to see what was for breakfast.

All thoughts of breakfast escaped her when she saw the second gift he’d left for her in the rotunda. A massive pile of books, easily enough to get her through the next few weeks and then some, were stacked on the window seat, topped by a flower and another note.

Smiling slightly, Harleen picked up the  [ flower ](https://c1.staticflickr.com/4/3433/3952185551_5676b39e52_b.jpg) and spun it in her fingers. It had jagged blue petals haloed by spidery, thinly-pointed needles, with little green tentacle-like tendrils sprouting out of its center, and it smelled like buttercups when she lifted it to her nose. She didn’t recognize it, but it was very pretty and very dangerous-looking.

Setting it aside, she turned to the note.  _ ‘To prevent boredom,’ _ it said.

Harleen delved into the books eagerly, carefully checking them and setting them aside in the same order she found them in. There was no theme or pattern to them that she could see, though she checked everything from the number of letters in the titles to the alphabetic arrangement of the authors’ names to the consistency of the page numbers. As far as she could tell, it genuinely was just a random assortment of reading material to keep her busy.

Except…Hadn’t she seen…?

Pushing back through the pile, no longer bothering to keep it in order, she pulled out a weatherbeaten botanical encyclopedia and began flipping through it, looking for all the plants Loki had mentioned when they’d been talking about the garden yesterday. Parsley, nutmeg, geraniums… No, wait. ‘Nutmeg geranium’ turned out to be one plant, a specific geranium variety that apparently smelled like nutmeg. Weird, but not particularly significant from anything she could see in its entry.

Nothing relevant about the parsley either, not even in the faded culinary notes scribbled in the margins in a handwriting she didn’t recognize as Loki’s or anyone else’s. What was the first thing he’d mentioned? A scientific name,  _ Melia _ something…

It took Harleen a while, but she finally tracked down  _ Melia azedarach _ , a flowering variety of the mahogany tree native to Southeast Asia and Australia. So what? There was nothing useful or interesting about that either, at least not in any way that meant anything to Harleen. The last thing Loki had mentioned, the tyrihjelm, whatever that was, was missing from the book entirely, although she checked every variety of spelling she could possibly imagine for it.

Was he laying false trails for Heimdall, or just fucking with her to piss her off?

“Both, obviously,” she grumbled aloud. Annoyed, Harleen put the encyclopedia down and went back to the pile to retrieve a trashy romance novel she’d passed by earlier, then retreated with it to the aviary to read and listen to the birds.

Still, the problem kept gnawing at her, keeping her from focusing on the unlikely misadventures of the pirate’s beautiful daughter and the strapping young soldier. She found herself frequently staring off somewhere above the page, compulsively looking for patterns in the crossing of branches or the movements of birds.

It was a very Victorian room, all glass and brass and filigree, essentially a greenhouse several stories tall. Hábrók glowered at her from one of the highest branches, and a cloud of some sort of smaller birds -- sparrows or starlings maybe, or maybe something unique to Asgard; she’d never taken a personal interest in ornithology -- swept by from one tree to another.

Victorian… the word tugged at a mental cord and Harleen chewed her lower lip, glaring aimlessly into the middle distance. One of the other books she’d seen had something to do with the Victorians, but she’d dismissed it as both uninteresting and irrelevant, so why was it bugging her now?

Nope. No. She refused to get sucked back into Loki’s stupid games. She was going to sit here, and read her trash, and not drive herself nuts hunting for some glorified da Vinci code, and that was final.

_ Oh, who the fuck are you kidding, Harley? _

“Goddamnit.” Abandoning the pirate’s daughter to her own devices, Harleen dashed back to the rotunda and dug back through the books until she found a retrospective on unusual Victorian hobbies, including taxidermy, death photography, and… “Gotcha!” ...  _ floriography. _ Discreet communications through the use or arrangement of plants and flowers.

Retrieving the botanical encyclopedia for cross-reference, Harleen was able to put a picture together in very short order. The  _ Melia _ had an absurd number of common-use names, but she finally found it in the floriography reference under Chinaberry, where it was listed as indicating ‘ _ dissension and strife _ .’

“Hey, stick to your strengths,” she muttered, flipping ahead to the next items. Loki did so love spreading dissension; that’s probably what he was off doing right now.

Nutmeg geranium and parsley, which he’d mentioned almost within the same breath of each other, meant ‘ _ an expected meeting _ ’ and ‘ _ useful knowledge _ ,’ respectively. But who was he meeting and what information was he hoping to get from them?

The only thing she  _ still _ couldn’t find was the tyrihjelm. What the hell was  _ that _ , and why wasn’t it listed anywhere? Etymologically, it was clearly Scandinavian, but…

“Oh, fucking duh! Use your goddamn brain, Harley.” Sprinting to the library with both books in tow, Harleen made a beeline for the Midgardian section and hunted until she found a Norwegian  guide to native flowers.

There it was! Tyrihjelm! Of course, she couldn’t actually read Norwegian, but she plopped down onto the library floor and began comparing its picture with everything in the first encyclopedia she’d found that even looked similar.

It looked almost like bluebells, so she flipped there first, but the two pictures didn’t look quite right next to each other, and the supplied Victorian interpretation of ‘ _ humility and unwavering devotion _ ’ sounded about as far from Loki as she could imagine. No, there was something else there; she was sure of it.

Harleen paged back to the very beginning and started with the ‘A’s, settling herself in for a long search. She was surprised and a little suspicious, therefore, when she found a match almost immediately, under ‘Aconite,’ but when she read through its entry, there could be no doubt.

A common wildflower across mountainous regions of northern Europe, aconite was described as  _ incredibly _ poisonous; even touching it for longer than a few seconds had side effects. “With large doses, death is almost instantaneous," the book said.

She didn’t need the floriography text to tell her it meant ‘ _ beware of nearby danger. _ ’

“What are you doing, Loki?” Harleen murmured aloud, tracing her finger along the picture of the pretty, deadly flower.

Then she remembered the other blue flower, the one that had been on top of the books with his note, the one that she’d picked up and twirled in her fingers and breathed in.  _ He wouldn’t… _

He would. She knew he would. For whatever fucked-up reasons of his own, he absolutely would if he thought there was the least advantage to be had in killing her.

Poring back through the pictures a little frantically, it took Harleen a lot longer to find, but she finally located  _ Nigella damascena _ and let out a sigh of relief to read that, despite its spiny, alien appearance, it was a perfectly harmless flower. Out of curiosity, she tracked it down in the Victorian guide and couldn’t hold back the tiny smile that crept into her face when she read its floriographical definition.

_ ‘You perplex me.’ _

 

Harleen was back in the aviary when Loki again reappeared from his mysterious errands. Having rescued the pirate’s daughter from a hungry peacock who seemed to have developed a taste for paper, she reclined on an iron bench, alternating between reading and watching the nebulous sky through the branches and the high-above glass.

She dropped the book when Loki showed up at the aviary door and bounced up out of the bench to come meet him, flinging herself into his arms to kiss him hard. It worried her how happy she was to see him again.

_ You’re playing with fire, Harley. _

_ Shut up. I’m just playing along with the game. This whole thing could be blown if Heimdall doesn’t buy the happy lovebirds routine, and then where will I be? Facing Asgardian justice just for  _ associating  _ with Loki, or extradited back to Earth for another chat with some very unhappy Avengers. I’m using him just as much as he’s using me. _

_ Yeah, that’s the only reason. Sure. _

“Miss me, kitten?” Loki asked with a smile, and Harleen hoped he couldn’t see how genuinely she beamed at him in response.

“You know I did,” she purred, kissing him again and snaking her arms around his waist. “Wait,” she snapped, pulling back suddenly to stare him in the face. “What was that?”

“What was what?” Loki asked, looking genuinely confused.

Harleen turned her head to suspiciously eye him sideways but she couldn’t find whatever it was she thought she’d seen flicker across his face, so she forced herself to relax and settled her arms back around his waist.

“There it is again! What was that look for?!” she demanded pulling back again.

“Harleen my dear, what are you --?”

“Don’t you try and bullshit  _ me _ , Mr. L,” Harleen interrupted. “What aren’t you telling me and why?”

“Really, kitten, I’ve no idea what it is you think that…”

Harleen tuned out Loki’s lies and watched him carefully through narrowed eyes instead. He was holding himself just a little oddly, and there was something in the angle of his chin she hadn’t seen in him before, a sort of tightness she couldn’t quite put her finger on.

Experimentally, she squeezed her arms just a tiny bit around him and caught the look again, along with a the briefest stutter in his voice and a slight increase in tension. He was definitely favoring his left side when she touched it. “Take your shirt off,” she said suddenly, cutting across whatever shit he’d been spinning and releasing him.

“Oh, you  _ did _ miss me,” he said, smiling wickedly and stepping in to push her hair back over her shoulder.

Harleen refused to be distracted. “Off,” she repeated, taking a step further back and folding her arms.

Tilting his head back, Loki puffed up his cheeks and blew out a slow, irritable breath at the sky, then pulled his shirt over his head. Now that she knew what to look for, she spotted the flinch as his arms stretched upwards.

Stepping back in, Harleen ran her fingertips lightly over his bare chest and stomach, but could only find smooth, unbroken skin.

“ _ Loki… _ ” she said in a warning voice. He must have realized she wasn’t going to let it go, because he didn’t bother arguing again before finally releasing the illusion he’d been holding and letting her see the dried blood splattered around the jagged gash in his left side.

“It’s  _ fine, _ ” he insisted as she let out a hiss of sympathetic pain.

“But what were you…?” Harleen stopped. He wouldn’t give her a straight answer, even if he could. She didn’t want to admit how protective she was feeling of him. She wasn’t sure she could convince herself that it was only for her own self-interest.

“I assure you, kitten, it’s fine,” he repeated. “It did not cut deep to begin with, and I’ve already begun healing it, see?”

The wound  _ did _ look a little older than Harleen would have expected it to if he’d only gotten it this morning, she realized as she examined it closely. It was a lot deeper than any of her miscellaneous cuts and scrapes had been, so it must have needed a lot longer to close up, but Loki seemed to have it under control.

He gave her a rueful grin. “Mother always insisted I spend more time learning healing magics. I would hate to confess to her how often it has come in useful.”

“Sounds like mine,” Harleen said with a little laugh. “Psychoanalysis wasn’t exactly what she had in mind when she kept pushing me to become another doctor.” Then she frowned thoughtfully, tracing her fingers around the edges of his wound, careful to avoid causing him any more pain. “Meeting didn’t go well, I take it?”

“One might say that,” he agreed, looking down to study her face as she continued frowning and tracing. He seemed on the verge of saying something else, but Harleen wasn’t listening closely.

She was thinking again about the moment by the fire when she’d eaten the orange and realized her tongue didn’t hurt anymore. The cut on her hand and the other, more visible injuries could have been healed for Heimdall’s benefit, to make him think Loki cared more about her well-being than he actually did, but whatever powers the watcher purportedly possessed, he wasn’t likely to go looking for a minor cut  _ inside  _ her mouth.

Why, then, had Loki done it, if it didn’t contribute anything to his little ruse? Anyone else, Harleen would have assumed they were just being nice, but Loki didn’t  _ do _ ‘nice,’ not for no reason.

_ Stop it. _

This was a dangerous trail of thought to follow.

_ You wrote it down yourself, Harley: “pathological attention to detail.”  _ It was all part of the plan, just setting the stage thoroughly, whether or not it would go noticed by its intended audience.

That’s all it was.

It had to be.

_ Right? _

She looked back up at Loki’s face, not sure what she was looking for. Something to imply he was even capable of doing something selflessly, however small? Something to confirm he wasn’t? She didn’t find either.

If Loki guessed the direction of her thoughts, he didn’t say so. “Harley?” he said curiously.

_ Harley _ . Her heartbeat echoed him.  _ Thm-thmp _ . So did her breathing.  _ Harley. _ In, out.

_ Har-ley. _

Harleen blinked and shook her head. She was being idiotic.

“Stop being a moron,” she told him, shoving his chest a little and silently advising herself to take her own advice. “If you go and get yourself killed doing something stupid, I’m calling dibs on your castle.”

Loki laughed and drew her in to kiss the top of her head. “I never do anything stupid,” he informed her with dignity. “It’s not in my nature.”


	20. Chapter 20

_ Click. _

Harleen awoke with a start and realized that the bed was empty and the soft sound that had awoken her was the door closing behind another one of Loki’s mysterious exits.

Scrambling out of bed, she grabbed her shoes and dressed quickly in the first clothes to come to hand while she went for the door as quietly as possible. 

She was just in time to see Loki turning left at the end of the covered walkway, and she followed him through the palace in the gray predawn light filtering in through the arched windows. Before long, he led her down a twisting stair into a corridor that had that same dampened, underground feeling she'd still never quite gotten used to back at S.H.I.E.L.D. 

Harleen hung back a little further from Loki to avoid the echoes in the still air giving her away, and almost missed him taking another sharp turn through a stone arch. She hovered just behind it, peering around cautiously in case he’d known she was following and was leading her into a trap.

Fortunately, his back was still to her. The arch opened onto more of a cave than a room, one vast end of it open to the air and curtained by one of the waterfalls surrounding the palace. A river flowed through the cave, disappearing somewhere into the darkness at the other end, and Loki was striding quickly towards a small, futuristic-looking boat docked there.

Harleen considered a few options. A part of her was tempted to try sneaking into the boat somehow and keep following him, but that seemed impractical at best. Playing follow-the-leader was one thing, but she wasn’t going to out-sneak a trickster god in close quarters.

Another part of her recommended going back to bed or scrounging up some breakfast. Whatever Loki was doing clearly didn’t have much to do with her, and anyway, now that she knew how he was getting in and out of the palace, she could always try and beat him here next time.

But three days of sleeping and reading and talking to birds and herself was about Harleen’s upper limit of inactivity, and she had a driving need to know what was going on, whether or not it was any of her business. Loki had crossed a stony footpath bridging the river and was doing something with the ropes on the far side of the boat. She took her chance and slipped up to the near side, waiting there when he came back across the path.

“Where we going?” she asked in a cheerful sing-song. A brief hiss through his teeth and a slight twitch around the shoulders were the only signs Loki gave that he was startled, but it was enough to make Harleen feel vindicated for his little prank in the rotunda after she first woke up.

“There are few who can sneak up on me, and fewer still who can expect to survive the experience,” he said icily.

“I’ll take that as the compliment I’m sure you intended it to be,” Harleen retorted. “Don’t change the subject. Where are we going?”

“ _ We  _ are not going anywhere.  _ I _ have business to attend to.”

“And  _ I  _ will be coming with you,” she insisted, mimicking his tone and folding her arms. “I’m  _ bored _ sitting around here all day and playing Happy Hausfrau! I’m not a prop you can keep shut up in storage to drag back out at your convenience.”

“I would not be so confident in your own autonomy, were I you,” Loki replied in a low and angry whisper. Pointing dismissively back at the door, he added in louder tones, “And you are most certainly  _ not _ coming. You will remain here and await  _ my convenience. _ ”

Harleen licked her lips and smiled serenely up at him, resting her hands on her chest, pretending to consider it. “Hmm… You  _ are _ sexy when you go all authoritative, but nah. Your thing sounds more interesting.”

Loki seemed to be calculating a risk briefly, then bent and hissed softly directly into her ear, “I assumed that if you were intelligent enough to decipher my warning, you would be intelligent enough to  _ heed it. _ You will be a distraction and a liability and I cannot guarantee your protection.”

“Then you assumed wrong, didn’tcha, Mr. L?” she responded, not bothering to lower her voice. Either Heimdall was listening or he wasn’t, and a decibel or ten wouldn’t make a difference. “Did I ask to be protected? No, I did not.”

“I do not  _ care _ what you did or did not request, Harleen,” he snapped. “I have spoken! This is none of your concern.”

“Okay!” she agreed cheerfully, shrugging a little and starting back towards the door. Loki was immediately on guard.

“That is all?” he asked warily.

“Well, sure,” she answered, pausing and turning halfway back towards him. “We both know I can’t really  _ stop _ you from making me wait here. Of course, I can’t make any promises about how I pass the time while you’re gone...”

Loki narrowed his eyes at her. She could see him running through visions of the mischief she could get into around the place, given several unattended hours of boredom and malice, and Harleen tried to look as innocent and harmless as possible, just to give him extra cause for alarm.

“Has anyone ever told you that you are  _ quite _ vexing?” he asked finally, rubbing the center of his forehead with his first two fingers.

“Nope! You’d be the first,” she said happily, scrambling back and over the side of the boat before he could tell her no again. “You never did say where we’re going, by the way.”

 

_ One of these days, Harley, he’s going to get tired of putting up with your shit, _ she thought as they pushed out from the cave.  _ You’re flirting with a very painful death every time you piss him off _ .

_ Nah, _ she replied to herself, pushing her wet hair out of her eyes as they cleared the curtain of water.  _ He still needs me, if only as a decoy. I’m safe as long as I’m useful _ .

Unfortunately, she soon discovered that that didn’t keep Loki from finding other ways to get his payback. The river flowing from the cave turned out to only travel a short distance before dropping off into another waterfall. Sitting with her back to the bow, Harleen didn’t notice until they were almost at the drop, and the bottom fell out of her stomach as she twisted around to see the boat teetering on the very edge of the falls -- only to smooth out and keep gliding horizontally out through the air as the water plunged below as great, feather-like protrusions of corrugated metal that she’d assumed were only decorative fanned upward and kept the boat aloft with a whirr of machinery.

Gasping shallowly, Harleen looked back to where Loki was sitting at the stern with his hand on an elaborate golden rudder. He was laughing, softly and viciously.

“Jerk-ass god,” she muttered under her breath, still gripping the sides of the flying boat with white knuckles. She didn’t know if Loki could hear her over the rushing water, but he gave her a self-satisfied smirk and settled himself comfortably back in his seat for the journey.

Since Harleen had her attention fixed firmly  _ inside _ the boat and not on the ground passing beneath them or the wind whipping around them, it was difficult to tell how quickly they were moving. It didn’t seem long, though, before the boat began slowing alongside a set of rocky cliffs, and she was surprised when she looked up to see the sweeping golden lines of the city directly above them; she’d have guessed it would have taken at least a couple hours to get there, but doubted they’d been flying longer than twenty minutes or so.

Either the atmospheric variations of Asgard contributed to an optical illusion creating the perception of greater distance, or maybe the advanced technology of the boat was much faster than she’d given it credit for, or possibly she was accustomed to accounting for the curvature of the Earth and had miscalculated the city’s relative distance given its absence, but then again…

There was a soft throat-clearing sound that she realized abruptly was the most recent of several, and Harleen jerked herself back into reality, not entirely sure how long she’d been staring off into space. The boat was docked again, in a smaller cave she hadn’t even noticed them pulling into, and Loki was already back on land, holding his hand expectantly out to her.

Harleen took it and clambered out to join him, making a face when her waterfall-drenched shoes squelched on the stone and made her toes feel cold and clammy. She missed her heels. Not that they would have been any more practical in this situation, but they were  _ hers _ , dammit, and at least slightly more water-resistant.

“Where is it that you go?” Loki asked curiously as they ascended another staircase, similar to the one that had led her down and out of the palace.

“Nowhere!” Harleen snapped defensively. Then she gave him an awkward, one-shouldered shrug. “Everywhere. I don’t know. It’s hard to get my brain to shut up sometimes.”

“Mmm,” was all Loki said in reply.

They emerged into a narrow alley that opened onto a thriving square, filled with Asgardians going about their daily business. Harleen shrunk back from the alley’s opening to avoid drawing attention -- the mismatched clothing she’d grabbed in the dark didn’t exactly shout, ‘I belong here.’ When she looked down, though, it turned out Loki had thought of that and bestowed her with the illusion of a silky, toga-like dress that could blend easily in with the crowd.

She looked back up to address Loki, not sure yet if she planned to thank him or snap that she didn’t  _ need  _ his help, but he had vanished. Of  _ course _ he had.

Blowing out an angry puff of air, Harleen scanned the crowd. He could have been literally  _ anybody _ in it if he was even visible at all, and she’d have no damn way of knowing whom. Really, she was less surprised that he’d ditched her, and more that she’d let him get away with it so fast. Harleen sighed heavily and shifted her weight, annoying herself with another damp squelching in her shoes.

...Or  _ had _ she let him get away with it? The sun had fully risen by now and was shining brightly over the pale stone paving the square. A set of wet footprints was already starting to evaporate where it left the alley next to her, but more were still clearly visible further out into the square where she could get glimpses around the moving bodies, and Harleen took off after the them before they could fade.

She was smaller than Loki and not averse to pushing her way rudely through the throng, so she quickly caught up to the source of the footprints, a bland-looking man with features that were almost pointedly boring and nondescript.

She determinedly dogged the man’s steps until the crowd cleared enough for her to come up alongside him. A sideways glance at her and an exasperated snort were enough to confirm she hadn’t been chasing a stranger. Loki was still clearly annoyed that she was there at all, much less that she’d caught up with him.

“Testing me or trying to get rid of me?” she demanded quietly as they left the square to turn down a wide lane.

“Would it matter?” he asked peevishly.

“To me or to you?”

The next sideways glance at her was still irritable, but also held the barest trace of a smile. He recognized what she was doing, and took it for the olive branch it was. “Which do  _ you _ think I was doing?”

“Knowing you, shouldn’t I assume it was both?”

“If I may rephrase, which would you  _ prefer _ it to have been?”

“Why wouldn’t I prefer it to have been a test, since I clearly passed it?”

“Did you?” Loki raised his eyebrows at her, but Harleen couldn’t answer him right away because they had passed onto another, busier street, and were temporarily separated by a large clump of people that wove between and around them.

She glared up at him as they rejoined on the other side. Loki was wearing another face and Harleen’s dress had changed again. She wondered vaguely if he was changing her face too, but while the city was rife with shiny decorations, they were walking too quickly for her to get a good look at herself. “ _ Obviously _ , I di--” she started, then quickly recovered  and lashed back with, “You’re just trying to fuck with my head now, aren’t you?”

“Would I do such a thing?” he asked with a wounded expression, putting a hand over his heart like she’d stabbed him there.

He  _ almost _ got her again. Almost. Harleen bit down on the emphatic, “ _ Yes, _ ” that nearly slipped out, and managed to divert it into another question. “I found you, didn’t I?”

“You did, didn’t you?” he mused, looking thoughtful. This was almost cheating, but Harleen decided to let it slide. She wasn’t sure his ego could take losing the questions game twice in a row, even if he would never in a thousand years admit that he’d lost in the elevator. To be fair, they were both pretty distracted then.

Perhaps he realized on his own that it wasn’t really his best effort, because he followed it up with, “How did you manage that, by the by?”

Harleen stuck her tongue out at him. “Why should I tell you?”

“ _ Must _ you be so childish?” Loki asked with an exaggerated sigh.

“Shouldn’t I get to be childish at some point in my life?”

Loki glanced curiously at her, but he didn’t ask what she meant. It was just as well; Harleen wasn’t sure what she would have told him. The question had slipped out, just something to keep the game moving without her really thinking about it. Goddammit, she of all people should know better. Thoughtless, instinctive impulses were all kinds of useful for revealing the psyche. That was probably why Loki liked the damn game so much.

Now it was her turn to try distracting him with a second question. “Where are we going, by the way, since you  _ still _ haven’t said?”

“Oh, kitten,” he chided. There was laughter in his unfamiliar eyes. “Why even bother asking?”

Harleen didn’t answer. She didn’t know. Once again, he was absolutely right; it didn’t matter where they were going, since they both already knew she would follow Loki anywhere.


	21. Chapter 21

“ _Father!_ I would have words with you!”

The gilded throne room doors swung inwards and hit the walls with a  _ bang! _ that fortunately covered Harleen’s involuntary snort of amusement. Loki had always been fond of dramatic entrances. From everything she’d heard, his brother was even worse. With Loki playing the part of Thor, ‘dramatic’ didn’t even begin to cover it.

Going by the bored faces of the courtiers surrounding her, such theatric interruptions were so routine as to have become tedious. They impassively watched their prince stride furiously down the long hall to stand at the foot of the steps leading up to the throne, one hand clenched around his famous hammer -- or at least, a reasonable facsimile thereof.

Odin had clearly seen this routine before too, and had no desire for a repeat performance. “What is it, my son?” he asked wearily, gesturing away the castellan he’d been in discussion with.

“I have just received word that we no longer maintain a presence in Nidavellir,” Thor bellowed. Harleen wondered where the real Thor was, and how Loki had ensured he wouldn’t come storming in with an interruption of his own. That could be awkward. Perhaps that was why he left so early in the morning to play these games; Thor seemed like the type to sleep in and miss all the fun. “I would know  _ why _ you have called back our men!”

“They were sent to investigate, and they have done so,” Odin explained with the air of a man who’d done so many, many times already. “Hence their return.”

“They cannot possibly have thoroughly explored the realm in so short a time,” Thor argued. “How can you be sure --”

“The dwarves do not have the Cube!” Odin’s words cut icily across his son’s. “We will not find it by invading all of our neighbors’ lands to overturn every rock and stone we find there. And until it is found and the Bifrost can be repaired, we do not have the resources to waste on fool’s errands!”

Harleen’s ears pricked up at that. Did the Asgardians  _ not _ have the Tesseract? But Thor had left with it in May -- that had been the deal. They got to keep Loki; he got to keep the Cube. He hadn’t liked it, but S.H.I.E.L.D. had put their foot down and forced him to choose one or the other, and he’d opted to leave Loki in their custody and return the Tesseract to Asgard.

It wasn’t news to the surrounding courtiers, though. While the royalty argued, they’d begun quietly chatting amongst themselves, clearly having lost interest in the proceedings.

“Third time in as many days they’ve been at each other’s throats,” Harleen heard someone whispering to their companion nearby. “How long do you grant it before they actually come to blows?”

Not long at all, going by the fact that Odin had risen to his feet in response to whatever else had just been said. “How  _ dare _ you question  _ me?! _ ” he roared down the shallow steps. “I sent you to Midgard -- at no small cost, I might add -- to retrieve both the Cube and your brother, and I see neither before me!”  _ If only he knew _ . Harleen was rather impressed by Loki’s ability to keep Thor’s face straight; he had to find that at least as funny as she did. “You are in no position to --”

“I  _ brought you _ the Cube! I am hardly to blame that you proved unable to  _ keep  _ it!” An upswell of murmuring went through the assembled court. Harleen was reminded of schoolkids hanging out in the halls, waiting to see if a fistfight would break out. “And as for Loki, how do we know he’s not the one to have stolen it?”

“That is impossible, as you well know,” Odin shot back. Harleen could confirm that much, at least; whatever else Loki had been up to, he’d at least been on Earth until just a few days ago, and by the sound of things, the Asgardians had barely had the Tesseract for a split second before someone else had taken it. That explained why Loki wasn’t trying to steal it from them, at least. Harleen knew how badly he must want it back, and was probably working at least as hard as Odin to track it down again.

“Is it!? He has proved capable of deceiving Heimdall in the past, and the Midgardians don’t know what they’re dealing with! We cannot be certain that he did not escape their realm and return to take the Cube.”

_ What are you playing at, Loki?  _ Cube aside, the rest of that was dangerously close to the truth. Was it really the smartest idea to put the possibility into Odin’s head? Unless, of course, Odin already knew of Loki’s recent escape. That seemed likely, actually -- all of the books had made a big deal about Heimdall’s loyalty to the throne, so anything he knew was sure to be passed along to Odin.

Then, assuming Loki was playing his role correctly -- which Harleen felt was a safe assumption -- Odin had apparently not chosen to loop the real Thor in on Loki’s return, probably assuming that he would act… well, about how he was apparently acting now. Asgard’s scion was not well-known for his ability to discreetly handle delicate situations.

On and on they went at each other; ‘dissension and strife’ was right. Harleen suspected that Loki had been spending most of his time the past few days picking fights like these, switching roles from one to the other whenever he could get either out of the way, just to make sure there was plenty of anger stirred up on both sides.

The court seemed to have given up hope that they might get to see a real fight and had fallen back into gossip and idle chatter. Harleen herself was beginning to feel their boredom; so far, neither of them had mentioned any other interesting tidbits about Loki or the Tesseract, but had descended into general name-calling and macho posturing.

“ _ Enough! _ ” Odin finally roared. “Begone from my sight, and do not let me see you again this day, else I will locate a realm much less pleasant than Midgard for your  _ next _ exile!”

The prince swept from the room, impressive little sparks of false electricity dancing along his hammer, and Harleen slipped through the crowd to follow him. She wasn’t the only one; it seemed a fair few of the courtiers had only shown up to spectate the daily feuds and now suddenly found pressing business to attend to elsewhere as Odin resumed his less interesting royal duties with the castellan.

Loki wasn’t visible any any guise she recognized when she escaped the throne room, so Harleen broke off from the crowd to loiter between a set of pillars. She was only there a few moments before she felt the back of her neck prickle and spun around to find yet another stranger smiling Loki’s smile at her.

“Trying to sneak up on me again?” she asked.

Loki looked a little nonplussed. “I would never,” he protested. “How did you know I was there?”

“Lucky guess,” Harleen said with a shrug. Loki had begun strolling easily through the capitol, and she followed, taking his arm. “That was quite the show in there, especially for a matinee. I might come back for the evening performance.”

“You may find the cast rather less talented and handsome during the later showings.”

“That seems shortsighted on the director’s part.”

“Isn’t it, though? No accounting for taste.”

She enjoyed this, the banter, the silly, over-extended metaphors. It reminded her of their conversations back at S.H.I.E.L.D., always playing for the one-up, the last word. He won more often than she did, but even when she lost, she always seemed to score more points than he expected her to, and she took that for a victory of its own. It was… fun. Harleen had almost forgotten what ‘fun’ felt like until he came along.

“Hey, you’re really --” The sentence was started before she’d meant to speak, before she even knew how it planned to end, and Harleen cut herself off.

Loki glanced at her and lifted his eyebrows, silently asking her to continue and Harleen felt warmth rising in her cheeks. That was something he did, she noticed. He could talk all damn day if you let him, spinning out yards and yards of bullshit and nonsense to distract from his real meanings, but at the same time, he didn’t waste words when a look would serve just as well. She liked that about him.

_ For fuck’s sake, Harley,  _ **_stop_ ** _ that! How often do we have to go over this? You’re nursing a schoolgirl crush for an actual, literal  _ **_psychopath_ ** _. He’s crazy; you know that. You  _ **_know_ ** _ he’s just using you, you’ve seen how easily he lies, hell, he’s already manipulated you into killing for him once, and what do you think he-- _

Goddamn, but that voice was getting tedious. With effort, Harleen blocked it out, rubbing her eyes with her knuckles in an attempt to keep the incipient headache at bay.

“Really full of yourself,” she finally answered Loki with a fake grin and a playful punch on his arm. If he noticed the war going on beneath the surface, he didn’t say anything.

“Jealous?” he asked, a smile of his own playing around the corners of his mouth.

“Huh?”

It was another stupid joke, and a crude one at that, and it took Harleen longer than she liked to admit to get it. She had the general idea within a few seconds, though -- that was about how long it took him to yank her suddenly sideways into what looked something like a darkened broom closet, push her back onto the nearest surface and swing one of her legs up over his shoulder. Before she could even start to laughingly protest, Loki had one slender hand clamped over her mouth to stifle the sounds she made as he drove into her.

It was incredible how fast he could take her over like that. One moment, Harleen’s mind would be over-crowded with staring around at Asgard, and flirting with Loki, and arguing with herself, and half a dozen other things all going on in her head at the same time, all desperate for her attention, and then the next, there was no room for anything but the need for  _ more _ of him.

The silence Loki could bring her was such a relief that it was almost addictive. All the mental chatter and the internal bickering faded out into white noise and left behind nothing but the smell of his skin and the frost of his touch and the feeling of him inside her. Harleen moaned into his hand and let the god wash over her like a tidal wave, drowning her, filling her, driving out everything except for himself.

She welcomed him in, melting backwards with her other leg wrapped around him and her fingers twisted up in his shirt to keep him close, keep him from pulling away and taking that bliss with him. The hand over her mouth vanished, only to be replaced by Loki’s own mouth kissing her hard, her lips frantically moving in time with his.

“I need you,” Harleen gasped. The words were all tangled up around the kiss, twisted in it like fingers twisted in fabric, and she had no idea if Loki could hear her or understand her or know what she meant, what she  _ really _ meant, but it didn’t matter as long as he kept kissing her, kept fucking her, kept all the other voices at bay. Nothing else mattered.

It couldn’t last, of course. The escape could only ever be temporary. They slumped against each other when they were finished, panting and disheveled, foreheads pressed against each other’s. Rubatosis began creeping in at the edges of Harleen’s awareness, like a war drum heralding the return march of her own thoughts.

She could feel Loki’s heart thudding, too, in syncopated counterpoint to her own.  _ So I guess he does have a heart, after all,  _ Harleen thought wryly,  _ even if he never actually uses it. _ It was always kind of disconcerting, coming across false evidence of his humanity like that.

It made it harder for her to remind himself how little he actually had.


	22. Chapter 22

The next stop on Loki’s errands turned out to be a broad, sweeping orchard just beyond the outskirts of the city. Having missed breakfast, Harleen went for one of the lower-hanging branches of the nearest tree.

“I don’t recommend that,” Loki commented off-handedly, strolling serenely past her. He was no longer disguised, presumably not caring if Heimdall managed to pick up their trail again. Actually, she realized, that was probably the point; it wouldn’t do to stay out of sight for too suspiciously long, so it was probably better to let him see them minding their own business far from the royal palace.

Harleen paused mid-stretch, fingertips frozen a fraction of an inch from the green apple she’d been reaching for, and glared suspiciously at him. “Why not?”

Loki only shrugged laconically and kept walking. Harleen bounced on her toes for a moment, trying to weigh how likely it was that the fruit was actually dangerous, versus Loki just testing how much he could control her with vague warnings. He didn’t give her any sign off bluff to call him on, and eventually she decided it wasn’t worth the risk.

“Oh, thanks. I’ll just keep starving, then,” she grumbled, leaving the branch alone and hurrying to catch up. Even with her stomach growling, she had to admit the orchard was a lovely place to walk. It was a beautiful day -- she was beginning to suspect Asgard didn’t have any other kind -- with the lightest of breezes ruffling her hair as she breathed in the smell of the trees and felt the sun on her face. “So, are you going to tell me why we’re --”

“ _ Loki! _ ” Harleen was interrupted by a honeyed purr of a voice coming from right behind them, and she jumped and twisted around to glare at the intruder. A leggy blonde in a short green dress was beaming at Loki. She reminded Harleen of a 1940s starlet, all wavy hair and simpering glamor, and looked incredibly out-of-place in the pastoral countryside. “What a  _ marvelous _ fortune coming across you here, of all places!”

“Amora,” Loki responded, turning more slowly. He smiled warmly, but Harleen saw the irritation tightening between his shoulder blades. God knew  _ she’d  _ put it there enough times to recognize it by now. Even so, she felt her own shoulders tightening as the blonde --  _ Amora _ , apparently -- walked up to join them on Loki’s other side, practically snuggling right up into him as they resumed their stroll. “You are looking well.”

“Such flattery!” Amora flapped her hand as if he’d composed a spontaneous ode dedicated to her beauty. “I thought you were still off -- oh, where was it I heard? Muspelheim, Midgard? One of those  _ middle _ planes, was it not?”

She still hadn’t acknowledged Harleen’s presence in the slightest, and Harleen found herself irrationally offended at the scorn that dripped from Amora’s voice at Midgard’s placement in the nine realms, like it were part of a slightly seedy neighborhood she preferred not to think about.

“What brings you here?” Loki deflected. “I was rather expecting to meet a friend of yours.”

“If you mean Skurge, I fear he’s been somewhat… waylaid,” Amora shrugged languidly, and Loki raised an eyebrow.

“One hopes he still lives.”

“But of course!” Amora flashed Loki a dazzling smile, and Harleen was suddenly, intensely aware of how well-matched the Asgardians looked next to each other, tall and smiling and both in green and gold, and how small and shabby she felt by comparison with her merely human stature and her disheveled mismatch of clothes. “I mean, almost certainly. I shall go by in a few days and check, but he looked quite happy when I left him. It comes to mind that he  _ did _ mention you may be here -- and of course, I simply  _ had _ to pause and give you my salutations when I saw you here all on your  _ lonesome _ .”

_ Oh, that  _ **_does_ ** _ it! _

Harleen abruptly plastered on the fakest smile she could muster, stopped walking, and leaned across Loki to thrust a handshake out at the new arrival, forcing him to a stop too. “ _ Hi _ ,” she cooed syrupily. “I don’t think we’ve been introduced! Dr. Harleen Quinzel, PhD. Listen, it has been just  _ so _ lovely to meet you, and I would just  _ love _ it if we could all chat, but I’m afraid Loki and I actually just the  _ teensiest _ bit busy at the moment, so maybe we can catch up another time, mmkay?”

Loki was discreetly and repeatedly kicking her in the leg, his face still pleasantly calm, but Harleen ignored him and forged on, answering herself without giving Amora time to respond first. “ _ Great! _ Talk later, then. Bye-bye now!”

The Asgardian woman stared at Harleen’s outstretched hand like she’d been offered a dead rat. She looked her up and down once, as if seeing her for the first time, then turned her full attention back to Loki and continued walking as if the interruption had never happened.

“Loki,” she admonished with a little moue, threading an arm around his. Harleen stiffly resumed her walk as well, the open hand closing into a fist as she drew it back in, but her smile still frozen rigidly in place. “I had not realized you’ve begun collecting strays! You’re not picking up your brother’s bad habits, are you? I have  _ always _ thought he’d be  _ so _ much handsomer had he not developed that concerning little Midgardian fixation, do you not agree?”

“That has never before seemed to deter you from pursuing him,” Loki pointed out mildly, subtly withdrawing his arm from hers. Amora’s pout deepened, eyebrows drawing down in the middle.

“Brute!” she accused haughtily, tossing her long hair over her shoulder. “Perhaps I’ll  _ not _ deliver you Skurge’s missive, then! I hardly think ‘twould be of any use to you now, seeing as you’re presently so occupied with  _ lesser  _ matters.” She bestowed Harleen with a nasty look, and Harleen smirked back in reply, casually taking Loki’s other arm.

He ignored her, his attention apparently on the conversation, but Harleen was pleased to see Amora’s eyes narrow when he  _ didn’t _ extract himself that time. “The message, please,” he requested calmly.

The goddess sniffed and drew a rolled-up little scroll of parchment from between her breasts, but didn’t hand it over. “What might be its worth to you?” she asked slyly.

“Any number of costs, perhaps least of all your blood,” Loki snapped coldly, his pleasant demeanor suddenly vanishing behind a harsh cloud as he stopped in his tracks and held out his hand at Amora. “I’ve little time for games, witch. Do  _ not  _ cause me to ask again.”

Amora drew back in affront, but Harleen was nothing but entertained to see somebody  _ else _ being inflicted with one of his about-faces for once.  _ He has time for games with  _ **_me_ ** _ ,  _ she thought smugly, only barely resisting the urge to stick out her tongue at the Asgardian woman.

Lifting her chin with offended grace, Amora spat, “Have your precious message, then!” and dropped the scroll scornfully into his open hand, before turning to slink back away through the trees, calling one last jab over her shoulder. “And do not feel obliged to return and beg my forgiveness once you’ve had done with playing in the  _ muck. _ ”

Harleen made furiously to lunge after her, but before she’d done more than shift her weight, Loki’s foot smashed painfully down on hers, then kicked her in the back of the knee as she staggered off-balance, and she fell back on her ass with a barely-stifled scream.

“The actual fuck, Loki?!” she gasped, involuntary tears of pain springing to her eyes as Amora disappeared out of earshot. “I think you  _ literally _ broke my toe, you fucking --”

“Desist,” he ordered distractedly, unrolling the parchment, and it was hard to say which of them was more surprised when Harleen automatically shut her mouth and obeyed. Silently fuming, she pulled her shoe off and poked gingerly at the purpling toe, hissing in pain as she confirmed it was  _ definitely  _ broken, and possibly the one next to it as well. Loki, meanwhile, finished reading his message, re-rolled it, and vanished it into a hidden pocket somewhere, before finally returning his attention to her.

“I apologize,” he said sardonically, squatting beside her on the grass and going out of his way to make it clear that he was only apologizing to meet her  _ clearly unreasonable  _ expectations and not out of any actual contrition. “I will consider mending it for you, if you answer me true: would you have halted with any lesser deterrent?”

Harleen considered lying, remembered there wasn’t any point, and shrugged resentfully. “Probably not.”

Loki grinned indulgently and settled himself cross-legged on the ground, drawing her foot into his lap and fixing his gaze on the offended digits. “Do you know, you develop the most charming little twitch in your brow when you’re jealous?” he teased.

He was toying with her, trying to flirt his way into her forgiveness again, and Harleen refused to give in. “I was  _ not _ jealous!” Loki looked up from her foot just long enough to give her a plainly skeptical stare, then turned back to his task. “She was a rude, evil, passive-aggressive bitch to me,” Harleen argued. “I don’t  _ need _ jealousy to hate her!”

“All very true,” he agreed easily. He touched Harleen’s broken toe delicately, a paradoxical warmth spreading out from his cool fingertips with a tingling sensation, like her foot had fallen asleep. “And yet…”

Loki let the implication hang on the air, and Harleen glared stubbornly, refusing to admit the obvious, godly lie detector powers or not. If she said it out loud, that would somehow superstitiously make it real, and she couldn’t allow that. She didn’t have any right to be jealous, and they both knew it. Claiming otherwise would be childish and pointless.

Besides, Harleen had never handled jealousy very well. The few times she’d allowed herself to feel it in the past, things hadn’t gone particularly well for anyone involved.

“There,” Loki said, pushing her leg back towards her again and standing briskly. “Give it perhaps an hour before you place your full weight upon it, but it will otherwise be well.”

Harleen took off her second shoe and held them both in one hand, then took Loki’s proffered arm with the other to rise unsteadily, favoring the still-healing foot. “Thank you,” she said uncomfortably, not sure how much of that was from polite obligation and how much from real gratitude. He  _ had _ broken the damn thing himself, after all, so he really didn’t deserve any brownie points for fixing it. And yet…

Harleen sighed heavily, leaning on Loki’s arm under the pretense of supporting her weight. And yet.  _ Goddammit, Harley. _

“You’ve gone quiet again,” he observed.

“I haven’t gone anywhere,” she assured him. “Just… thinking.”

“What of?”

She wasn’t going to spill her guts  _ that _ easily, so Harleen went on the offensive instead. “So, you have a history with Tall-Blonde-and-Slutty?”

Loki snorted lightly. “You would be hard pressed to find a man in all the higher realms who does not.”

“That doesn’t entirely answer my question,” Harleen pointed out, just to make sure he knew that she’d noticed, and moved on. “Who was it she was delivering that note from? And what was in it?”

“A warrior I find occasionally useful for small tasks. Not the most reliable fellow, particularly when the Enchantress has him in her thrall, but he seems to have found some of what I sought before becoming, as she so delicately put it,  _ waylaid _ .” Loki gazed at the sky as they made their way slowly back to the boat. “Odd that she would agree to deliver the missive on his behalf. She’s not ordinarily the sort to do any favors without an underlying motive.”

“Can’t imagine what  _ that’s _ like,” Harleen muttered, and Loki laughed freely.

“We are all three guilty, then, if we’re to be casting stones now. Perhaps she simply wished to confirm for herself that I’d returned.”

“Or she just wanted to get in your pants, once she’d screwed What’s-His-Face unconscious.”

“Also likely.”

“So, what  _ did _ the note say?” Harleen asked, remembering suddenly that he’d never answered that one.

“It provided me with a piece of what I lacked during yesterday’s attempt to discover certain information for myself,” he answered cryptically, and Harleen’s eyes drifted involuntarily down to his side. She wondered if the scar there was still healing; it had been a lot deeper than anything else she’d seen him take care of so far. She wondered again what he’d been doing when he got it, and what information he’d been trying to get. Something about the Tesseract, most likely.

Loki’s gaze followed hers. “Trying to get my shirt off again?” he suggested coarsely in her ear, and Harleen laughed.

“You are  _ insatiable! _ ” she accused, slapping his chest playfully as they came within sight of the boat. She stretched up on her good foot to kiss him when they stopped beside it, bracing herself on his shoulders, and he returned it enthusiastically with his hands on her waist.

“Take me home, Mr. L,” Harleen demanded haughtily when they drew apart, trying to imitate one of Amora’s snooty hair-flips. She suspected she pulled it off rather less glamorously, but it made him laugh again, which was all she’d been going for.


	23. Chapter 23

“You’re thinking too much,” Loki commented, glancing up from the book he’d been pretending to read from where he reclined on a couch a few feet away from Harleen.

The day was drawing into evening, and she was sitting cross-legged on the library floor, frowning in concentration at her own fingertips. “Story of my life,” she grumbled, more to herself than to him.

“Don’t think;  _ see, _ ” he instructed, closing the book and putting it down. Still single-mindedly focused in on her task, Harleen was only tangentially aware of him getting up to walk over to her. “No, don’t close your eyes.” Harleen’s concentration broke with a sharp smack on the back of her head. “How do you intend to see with your eyes closed?”

“Ow!” she protested, rubbing her head and glaring up at Loki. With a sigh, she let her hands fall back into her lap, toying disgruntledly with the hem of her skirt.

“How long did it take  _ you? _ ”

“The better part of twenty years just to begin, and at least another hundred or two to consider myself moderately skilled,” he informed her. “You’ve been at it for, what, an hour or two? I’m honestly still not certain what you wish to gain from this, even if it  _ were _ that simple.”

“I told you; I’m tired of feeling useless. All I did today was tag along and piss off your skanky ex -- which was admittedly pretty fun, but not really super fulfilling. I want to  _ do _ something, something that matters.”

Loki caught the dispirited look on her face and relented, crouching next to her on the ground. “But then, I was young and much of that time was spent willfully ignoring my studies. You quite frankly don’t have enough years in your lifetime for anything resembling mastery, but you’re not completely unintelligent, for a mortal. You’re not  _ entirely  _ incapable of some small progress.”

Harleen twisted around to smile at him. “Y’know, I think that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me,” she teased.

“Don’t let it get to your head,” he ordered, with another light smack. “Try again.”

Harleen turned back to her hands and lifted them in front of her, palms out. She almost closed her eyes again to concentrate harder, but widened them quickly to prove they were still open when she felt Loki’s hand move.

_ Don’t think; see, _ she reminded herself like a mantra, trying to block out the library and the palace and even Loki’s presence just behind her shoulder, and zero in on the space right in front of her, willing an image to appear in the air. She pushed as hard as she could, and… nothing.

Magic was just sufficiently advanced science, and Harleen was a scientist, right? This should be easy for her. Illusions were really just about imagining something so hard you made other people imagine it too. Harleen had always had a vivid imagination -- sometimes  _ too _ vivid. She could do this.

Resettling herself more comfortably on the floor, Harleen took a deep breath and tried again.  _ Don’t think; see _ . She strained harder and harder, pushing against a wall she always felt was just on the verge of breaking, but never did.

It was still useless. Maybe it always would be. Maybe Loki was wrong, or lying, and humans just weren’t capable of this shit the way semi-immortal space wizards were. This had been a stupid idea to begin with.

She deflated with a long puff of air through pursed lips and felt Loki standing back up behind her. “Leave that for now,” he said, mercifully not commenting on her failure. He held out a hand to help her up, and she took it and clambered to her feet, no longer even feeling a twinge in her foot. “Come to bed, kitten.”

“I’m not tired,” she argued, and Loki smirked as he bent in for a kiss.

“Good.”

 

To her surprise, he was still there the next morning, sitting up in bed and reading when she awoke, early sunlight streaming across his chest. Harleen blinked muzzily at him and stretched up on one arm, the soft blanket slipping down off her bare torso. Loki glanced sideways at her and smiled in greeting. “No vanishing act this morning?” she asked sleepily.

“I’d hate to become predictable,” he replied, turning a page.

Harleen yawned. “God forbid.”

“I  _ will _ actually be departing shortly,” Loki admitted as she sat all the way up, pushing her hair out of her face. “And no, you are  _ not _ invited. I suspect my task would only bore you, regardless; it will be much the same as yester-morning, only reversed.”

So, he’d be playing Odin today, haranguing Thor whenever he could get away with it and driving the wedge more deeply between them. To what end, Harleen wasn’t entirely sure. Pure spite, possibly, but more likely, it had something to do with getting Odin’s spear, which in turn might help with getting the Tesseract back.

Plans within plans, schemes within schemes. She yawned again, and climbed out of bed to start hunting for a clean shirt. “That’s all right,” she agreed cheerfully. “I can amuse myself today.” Loki, meanwhile, was getting out of bed himself, and Harleen stole a nice, long ogle at his bare ass as he went to go get dressed.

He gave her a deep kiss when he emerged a few minutes later, looking as dashing and regal as ever. “I’ll be rather later tonight, so fear not if you do not see me by dark,” he warned her. “Can I trust that the walls will still be standing by that time?”

Harleen shrugged mischievously. “I can’t make promises,” she answered with a giggle. “The odds will be better, the faster you get back.”

Loki sighed and gave her a little eye-roll, then kissed her again, sneaking a little tongue in that time. “And kitten?” he added in a whisper, letting one hand drift down to cup her ass. “When I return, I expect you to be waiting  _ right _ here for me. Wear the black silk.”

 

Harleen spent most of the day unsuccessfully practicing, trying to find the spark of illusion Loki had assured her was there  _ somewhere. _ She took occasional breaks to read or bother the birds or just wander around the rooms she hadn’t gotten around to exploring yet, and when she got too restless, she’d go out into the garden and burn off energy swinging from tree branches or playing with cartwheels and handsprings. She still wasn’t used to having this much free time on her hands, and didn’t entirely know what to do with herself.

When the sun started sinking down past the golden city and the swirling nebulae began to grow more distinct above, Harleen went back up to the bedroom to sort through her pile of clothes. The black silk dress he’d requested was a classy little number with a clinging pencil skirt, plunging neckline, and ruched waist. She could tell just by looking at it that it would hug her figure in some very flattering ways, and it was just the sort of thing that someone like Amora would probably look phenomenal in.

Harleen didn’t doubt her ability to pull off the look either, but… it just wasn’t really  _ her _ , was it? She pondered the dress for a moment, then threw it back into the pile and kept digging. It bothered her how quickly she’d been prepared to wear it just because Loki had said so, how much she’d fallen in the habit of obeying his orders. Hell, she’d barely even argued with him on  _ anything _ since she’d bullied him into letting her follow him yesterday.

If Loki wanted black silk, he could ask nicely, and she’d think about it. Until then…

Harleen collected a small assortment of probable candidates in need of only some small adjustments for what she had in mind. A dagger borrowed from the armory helped her cut down a pair of jean shorts into proper daisy dukes that let several inches of her cheeks spill out at the bottom. A fussy Victorian blouse lost its sleeves and most of its collar, leaving behind a punkishly frayed corset top that did a fantastic job pushing her boobs up and out.

Harleen appraised herself critically in the full-length mirror and gave herself a satisfied nod. **_Much_** _better. Still sexy, and way more Harley._

It was almost fully dark out now, and still no sign of Loki. Arranging herself attractively on the bed, Harleen faced the door and waited.

...For all of about two minutes. She’d resolved to give him ten, adjusted that down to five after maybe thirty seconds, and still couldn’t make it that far before getting bored and wandering off.  _ It’s his own fault, really _ , she argued to herself.  _ ‘Maybe after dark sometime, probably, IDK’ isn’t exactly a reliable estimate to plan around, and I have my own shit to do. I mean, not really, but I  _ **_might._ **

After a little more aimless wandering, Harleen ended up back in the library and threw herself on the couch there to read and pass the time, although it only turned out to be about half an hour before Loki’s footsteps above drew her eyes to the ceiling and she bit her lip with a smile. That half-hour would have been torture, sitting up there with nothing to do but wait, so she didn’t regret a thing. He’d figure it out.

Flipping over onto her stomach, Harleen waved her legs in the air behind her and went back to her book, realizing only a few seconds before the library door opened that she had it turned upside down. Correcting it, she pretended not to hear Loki approaching until he was right over her, arms folded and looking dangerously displeased.


	24. Chapter 24

“I thought I made my expectations quite clear.”

Harleen blinked as if in surprise, and smiled coyly up at Loki. “You, of all people, should know better than to believe everything you think.” Honestly, she had no idea what that meant, but it was the sort of cryptic bullshit  _ he  _ so loved to torment  _ her _ with, and she saw no reason not to turn the tables when the opportunity presented itself. She turned back to her book like that was the end of the conversation.

He somehow managed to loom even more darkly over her, in a way she was pretty sure would have terrified her not even a week ago, but that was the point, wasn’t it? Loki was  _ fun _ when he was scary. 

“When I give you explicit instructions, I  _ expect _ them to be followed.”

Harleen faked a yawn and turned the page, with no idea where she’d even been on the last one. “You obviously haven’t been paying attention, then,” she retorted coolly. “Or else you’d’ve modified your expectations by now.”

The book was pulled from her hands and Loki tossed it unceremoniously aside. “I think,” he said icily, taking her chin in cold fingers and yanking it back up to look at him, “you’ve grown complacent, little kitten.”

“Why?” she asked, jerking her chin back away from him as a thrill of anticipation ran through her. “Because I ain’t scared of you anymore, Mr. L?”

“You should be,” Loki said softly. He ran his fingers gently along and up her cheek, then grabbed a rough handful of her hair and dragging her head upwards, pulling her stumbling into a standing position. “Have I not already shown you that?” he asked with bared teeth, getting his face right in hers.

Harleen didn’t bother hiding her wild smile. Let him see how much his anger turned her on. “Exactly,” she hissed right back at him. She flexed her shoulders back and subtly leaned forward, and was rewarded when his gaze involuntarily dropped down to her chest for a split second. “We both already know you can  _ make _ me do whatever you want. You’re stronger and faster than me and maybe even sometimes smarter, too. Why bother  _ ordering _ me around when you can just force me?”

“That is not the point,” he growled, dropping his hand down to grasp the back of her neck and pacing slowly around behind her. “You need to learn obedience.”

“I bet you’re used to that, aren’tcha?” Harleen asked, licking her lips. She twisted out of his grip and spun to face him, taking a few steps backwards just to make him pursue her. “I bet all your other girls were just so in  _ awe  _ of your power and your royalty, they didn’t even think to talk back, did they?” She let her voice go all high and mocking as she imitated them. “I bet it was all, ‘ _Yes, my lord_ ,’ and ‘ _No, my lord_ ,’ and ‘ _Oh, pretty please may I suck your perfect dick, my lord?_ ’”

Loki made a grab for her, and she just managed to dance out his reach, circling behind the couch to put it between them. She was pissing him off, all right, but it wasn’t enough. Harleen wanted to see him lose control again

“I bet Amora was worst of all. I bet she’s a  _ super _ fake screamer. She seems like the type.” Harleen put her hands on the back of the couch, popping her foot back and leaning tauntingly towards him. “I bet you barely even touch her before she starts all --” She let out a few loud, obscene moans, but couldn’t sustain it before she caught sight of Loki through half-closed eyes and dissolved into laughter. “Is that what you want from me,  _ my lord? _ ”

Loki followed her around the couch, taking his time, and Harleen stepped away in unison, keeping distance but letting him back her up slowly towards a library table. For all his obvious fury, he was clearly enjoying this as much as she was, but he still was in control of himself. It was just as well; if  _ that _ had been what pushed him off the edge, Harleen might not have been able to talk herself out of jealousy.

Time to start fighting dirty. “Then again,” she suggested philosophically, “I bet most of them were just killing time until they could get what they  _ really  _ wanted.” Biting her lip, Harleen stopped at the edge of the table and let Loki close in before whispering, “How many girls were just fucking you to get to your brother?”

_ Crack! _

_ There _ it was. Her head whipped around with the impact and she put a hand to her cheek where it still burned like frostbite, panting savagely as she looked back up at him with a grin.

“Again,” she whispered, but ducked under his next strike and landed a strike of her own across his face. Loki caught her wrist right afterwards and yanked her towards him, and she used his momentum to pull herself up into a harsh kiss.

They explored each other’s mouths furiously, biting and nipping at any lips or tongues that were incautious enough to come too close to teeth, and then he threw her sideways hard enough that she almost cracked her head on the table on the way to the floor.

“On your knees,” he demanded, pulling off his overrobe and flinging it on the ground behind him.

“ _No_ ,” she snarled gleefully, backing up from him along the floor.

He followed and stepped over her, smiling mirthlessly down. “Don’t make me force you, kitten,” he persuaded silkily. “I won’t pretend you won’t enjoy it, but you may just regret it.”

Harleen met his gaze, slowly running her tongue along her upper lip. Keeping steady eye contact just to prove she was only doing it because  _ she _ wanted to, she pulled her legs underneath her and rose up onto her knees to unlace his breeches and pull his cock free.

Holding his shaft tightly around its base, she wrapped her lips around his head and flicked her tongue lightly across his frenulum. Encouraged by a stifled gasp from above, Harleen began sucking deeper, moving her hand up and down the shaft where her lips didn’t reach and bracing herself with her other hand around his leg.

Loki groaned and slipped a hand around the back of her head, encouraging her with clenched fingers to work her way faster along his flesh. Still bobbing up and down, Harleen lifted her eyes to smile pertly up at Loki around his cock, then dropped him a wink and let her teeth graze gently around the sensitive spot just underneath his head.

He gasped again, more harshly, and grabbed her by the hair with both hands. Harleen let him take over, opening her mouth wide so he could fuck it how he wanted. She released his shaft and slipped her hand into her shorts, but before she got past the waistband, he pulled himself free and smacked her hard in the back of the head.

“Did I permit you to touch yourself?” he asked roughly, hauling her to her feet again by one arm.

“Did I  _ ask? _ ” Harleen demanded in return, yanking her arm free and wiping the back of her hand across her mouth.

Loki grabbed her arm back again, digging his fingers into her wrist. She aimed a punch at him with her free arm, but he caught that one too and spun her around, forcing both arms behind her back and bending her over the table.

“Remember, kitten:  _ you _ were the one who wanted to play with claws,” he purred in her ear, running his hand gently along the exposed underside of her ass. “As you said, I am stronger than you...” Although Loki’s voice didn’t change from a smooth, threateningly calm murmur or give any warning of the impending strike, a vicious spank landed unexpectedly on Harleen’s ass.

“And faster than you...”  _ Smack. _ The second one came down even harder in the exact same spot as the first.

“And, yes, smarter than you.”  _ Smack! _ Loki’s aim was infallible. Harleen’s cheek was burning raw, but she clenched her teeth, refusing to give him the satisfaction of any sounds of pain. He still had her arms pinned behind her back, but she kicked blindly out at him, hoping to catch an ankle or a shin.

“Haven’t you been listening, little kitten?” With mocking laughter, Loki hauled her back upright, pulling her head back towards him with one hand wrapped lightly around her throat. “This is not an equal contest of wills.  _ I _ will make my desires known, and  _ you _ will heed them without question.”

“Or what?” Harleen gasped eagerly. “You’ll punish me like the bad, bad girl I am?”

“No,” he answered silkily, so quietly she might not have heard it if his lips hadn’t been right against her ear. He released her throat and settled his arms around her, holding her from behind in a gentle lover’s embrace, and Harleen stiffened, suspecting a trap. “I shall turn and depart, and leave you with no one but yourself for company.”

Goddamn him. Harleen’s lips tightened. She  _ had _ gotten complacent, so smug about finally having gotten better at reading Loki that she’d forgotten how well he’d always been able to read her.

“Now... Since you so kindly suggested it, I want, ‘Yes, my lord,’ to be the next words I hear fall from those pretty mortal lips,” he said. “Do you understand?”

She took a deep breath and fought down any number of smartass retorts. He had the checkmate and he knew it. “Yes, my lord,” she ground out through gritted teeth.

Oh, he liked that. He liked that a  _ lot _ . She felt his hard length twitch where it was pressed up against her, and he responded in deliciously pleased tones. “Surely, that was not  _ so  _ difficult, Harley.”

_ Harley.  _ For her obedience, she was rewarded with the sound of her name on his lips and she shuddered as it echoed around her head. “Please,” she whispered, the word out before she could stifle it.

“Please  _ what? _ ” he asked playfully. Harleen pushed back an upswell of anger. He knew perfectly fucking well what she wanted, and he wanted to hear her beg for it.

Fighting for self-control, Harleen turned her head to looked up at him as sweetly as she could manage, with wide, pleading puppy eyes. “Please fuck me?”

Loki chuckled and bent to kiss the curve where her neck met her shoulder, then ran the tip of his tongue lightly up to just under her ear, where he softly prompted, “Please fuck me,  _ what? _ ”

Harleen closed her eyes, feeling like she was on the verge of hyperventilating with fury and need and restraint. “ _ My lord. _ ”

In one swift movement, Loki tore her shorts roughly down and forced her back over onto the table and then he was pressing into her, filling her, fulfilling her, taking her over. She braced herself against the table, nails digging little half-moons into its varnish as he slammed angrily into her.

“ _Oh, god, yes, fuck me, fuck me hard!_ ” she babbled, delirious with pleasure.

Another hard smack landed on her ass, perfectly timed with a thrust and bringing tears to her eyes as it reignited the flaming patch of skin. “Are  _ you _ commanding  _ me? _ ” he asked dangerously. He only paused for a fraction of a second, but it was enough to make her panic, frantic to keep him from withdrawing.

“N-no, my lord,” she answered hurriedly. He pulled her hair back, forcing her chin upwards, and she felt his fingers latch again around her throat, harder this time. He didn’t choke her all the way out like he had their first time, but held a steady pressure there, cutting off just enough air that her vision went gray at the edges and she felt dizzy and light-headed, every sensation magnified, every thrust intensified.

She groaned hoarsely and came hard, but another spank kept her from relaxing against the table.

“You aren’t finished yet,” Loki growled, pulling out and yanking Harleen back up to standing again. He tossed her carelessly against the nearest bookcase, where the shelves and corners of books dug painfully into her back. Her jellied legs almost collapsed underneath her, but then Loki was there, supporting her and giving her something to cling to even as he pushed her harder into the sharp edges.

He yanked down on the roughly-cut collar of her top and the long row of tiny wire closures down the front bent and snapped apart, letting her breasts spill out. Immediately, his mouth was on one, tongue teasing her nipple into a hard little point while his teeth bit into the soft flesh around it.

With an ecstatic whimper, Harleen dropped a hand and grasped his erection, still sticky with her juices. Loki made a muffled sound and redoubled his efforts while she tugged faster, and then he slapped her hand away and plunged back into her again, hauling her up between himself and the bookcase and moving his mouth back up for another violent kiss.

The case began to rock dangerously with the force of their thrusts, a few books already shaking themselves free, so Loki pivoted away from the shelves and dropped Harleen on the ground. Not lowered -- dropped. Harleen’s breath was knocked out of her as her back slammed into the floor and she aimed an angry slap at Loki’s face as he descended over her, fingers curled into claws.

Again he caught her wrist, this time before the strike landed, and pinned it down while he straddled her, resuming their rhythm like it hadn’t been interrupted. Baring her teeth at Loki, she snuck her other hand around him before he could grab that one too and found an exposed patch of skin at the small of his back. Clawing upwards in a single swipe that left blood beneath her fingernails, Harleen threw her head back and laughed wildly when he snarled at her in wordless animal rage.

The strike she’d known must be coming hit her in the side of the head, causing stars to explode briefly across her vision, and then Loki’s hand clamped over her mouth, cutting off her laughter. He pounded faster and harder than ever, pushing her up and over the edge, and Harleen sank her teeth into the ball of his palm as she came again with a muffled scream.

With a growl, Loki pulled his hand to the side and forced his thumb into her mouth, hooking it open, and glared manically down as he drove relentlessly into her. It was the first time she had ever seen him break a sweat, and Harleen revelled in the victory.

“Say it,” he commanded in a hoarse gasp. He didn’t say what he wanted to hear, and Harleen didn’t bother pretending she didn’t know. The time for playing dumb was long past. Besides, it was almost true anyway.

“I’m yours,” she panted breathlessly when he withdrew his thumb so she could speak freely. “I’m yours, my lord. I’m yours.”


	25. Chapter 25

The pair of them drowsed on the library floor some hours later; Harleen wasn’t sure how many and didn’t care. She sat with her back up against the bottom of the overturned couch with Loki’s head rested in her lap.

_ I guess he  _ **_does_ ** _ sleep sometimes _ , she thought with a little amusement as she recognized his breathing shift and slow. Brushing his hair back from his eyes, she lightly traced his face with her fingertips, settling in with sleepy satisfaction to take stock of their collective trophies.

She was mostly bruises, Loki mostly scratches, though she’d traded him a black eye for a split lip at one point. That was a while ago, though, and her lip had mostly stopped bleeding by now. Tracing carefully around Loki’s eye, Harleen remembered the fading remnants of the first bruise she’d given him that had still been on his face when he finally revealed himself. It occurred to her to wonder why he had concealed it for all that time instead of healing it. She smiled. Maybe he’d just wanted to keep it.

She wore a few overlapping necklaces of long-fingered bruises around her throat, paired with matching bands of varying shades around both wrists and ankles. Darker stars and flowers were scattered around her breasts, stomach, neck, calves, anywhere Loki could sink his teeth into. Probably plenty across her ass and the backs of her legs, too. She’d hurt like hell in the morning, but Harleen didn’t care.

In exchange, she’d given him a good collection of claw-marks streaking up and down his back to add to the first set. The lines she’d finally managed to swipe across his face at one point didn’t count -- they had barely broken skin, after all -- but she was quite proud of the deeper scratches crossing his chest at various angles.

Loki sighed softly in his sleep, and Harleen turned her attention back to his face with a smile. She had never seen it so relaxed before. It was always active, always intentional, never at rest. Even holding still, Loki’s features were always carefully arranged to display what he chose. Harleen had gotten better at seeing past the mask, but she’d never seen it disappear completely before.

He looked… happy.

The warnings began distantly to sound again in the back of her mind, slowly marching into the still library air. She was hovering so closely on the edge of something mind-bogglingly stupid and dangerous, would probably already be there if it weren’t for the constant nagging of her own head intruding into every quiet moment with rhythmic beats of  _ No _ , and  _ Stop that _ , and  _ Be careful. _

Harleen was tired of being careful. She wouldn’t have ended up here at all if she’d been  _ careful _ , would she?

Gently, she extracted herself from the sleeping god and lowered his head to rest on the floor, then stood. Whatever was left of her shirt had ended up somewhere under the table, so she retrieved his from behind the couch instead, shaking it out to confirm it was mostly intact. Running her hands along random books’ spines, she wandered out of the library, pulling the shirt on as she went.

Once she safely had a door between herself and Loki and wouldn’t disturb him, Harleen began humming tunelessly as she made her way for the aviary. Slipping inside, she settled herself on the ground and just sat for a little while, trying to clear her mind. It seemed easier than it had been the last few times she tried; maybe the afterglow was still helping keep the voices muffled.

Gradually, she began once again to focus on her fingers, pushing away the smell of the greenery and the roughness of the floor and the sleepy rustling of the birds.

_ Start with color. Red. Think red. No, don’t  _ **_think_ ** _ red; see it. _

Red shoes. Red apple. Red sundress. Red lips in the mirror, red blood on the ground, red pen in her hand, red crayon on white paper --

_ No, stop it. That’s red  _ **_things_ ** _ , memories of reds that have already come and gone. Make a new red. Not red anything; just red itself. _

She stared harder at her fingertips, willing herself to imagine the color there, superimposing it over the reality of her hands in front of her, augmenting reality with her will, trying to trick her real eyes into agreeing with her mind’s eye.

_ Now choose a shape,  _ she continued, repeating the instructions Loki had given her she-didn’t-know-how-many times now.  _ Take the red, keep the red, hold it there, don’t lose it, but give it form. Do you want smudges? Sparkles? Streaks? Keep it simple; keep it fluid. Don’t try for any hard lines yet. _

Staring harder, the edges of her vision blurring and tunneling with fierce concentration, Harleen imagined red sparks dancing around her fingertips, little clouds of tiny red pinpricks of light tracking her fingers’ every twitch and movement.

It was both delicate and strenuous, like forcing together two rusted pieces of an ancient mechanism without breaking them. She’d gotten this far so many times before, only to have her carefully maintained living image fall apart into nothing as she tried to make it merge with a reality that didn’t accept it.

_ Don’t think; see. See it. Make it real. _

She could see them, the clouds of red dots; she was so close. The conflicting pictures, the world with her sparkles and the world without, hovered over each other just off-centered, like two translucents misaligned on an old projector.

She pushed them closer and closer together, hardly breathing, positive that one of them would break or possibly that she’d just burst a blood vessel in her brain before they finally clicked together.

The red sparkles kept dancing.

There was a sudden, sharp intake of breath from the door. Harleen’s focus snapped in two and the glittering lights disintegrated into desaturated reality, but she didn’t care. She was looking up in awe and glee at Loki, still shirtless and bloodied and tangle-haired, standing with one hand on the doorknob and staring at her hands with open shock.

“You  _ saw it! _ ” she shrieked, launching herself up off the ground to tackle him at a run.

She had only ever seen Loki look so surprised once before, and she wondered how much of his encouragement yesterday had been an indulgence, a way to keep her feelings from getting hurt until she forgot about the project and moved on.

Who cared?  _ She _ had known she could do it, and she had. It wasn’t much, just a split-second of blurry nonsense shapes, and maybe that’s all she would ever do, if even that had almost given her a cerebral aneurysm, but she had done it. That was hers.

He caught her automatically when she flung herself at him and wrapped her legs around his waist, peppering giddy kisses onto his dumbstruck lips. For a second, it looked like he was thinking of arguing with her, trying to deny what he’d seen. Harleen got ready to fight him on it, but he seemed to realize it would be pointless -- and maybe, just maybe, he really was just a little bit proud of her.

He only gave her faint praise, but from Loki, she wouldn’t have believed any other kind. “Well done, Harley,” was all he said after he finally kissed her back and set her down on the ground.

_ Harley. _

_ Thm-thmp. _

_ Har-ley. _

_ In, out. _

 

There was a battered cardboard box back in her quarters at S.H.I.E.L.D., or at least there used to be; she had no idea what had become of her old possessions in the past week, and didn’t really care. The box wouldn’t stand out to anyone. It was shoved into a corner, half-buried under the detritus of living and working in a small space. It had ‘Trophies’ written on the side in black marker.

Every once in a while, when Harleen was in a reflective mood, she’d make sure her webcam cover was on and her door was locked, and she’d unearth the box and haul it out into the light. Unfolding its many-times-creased cardboard flaps, she would carefully unpack the little gymnastics statuettes and academic ribbons and varicolored medals, all delicately wrapped in newspaper. She’d unwrap them from the paper and then she would toss the statuettes and ribbons and medals carelessly back into the box and smooth the pages out on her desk.

She’d reread the old, familiar headlines and relive the memories they implied. Her name never came up -- there was nothing to connect her to any of the stories-- but  _ she _ knew. She knew and no one else did. No one had ever bothered to find out more.

One of those old memories occurred to her now as she stood in the doorway with Loki, giddy elation filling her chest, his words pounding in her ears. She wasn’t sure why; it didn’t really seem relevant. If S.H.I.E.L.D. had been a lifetime ago, this was from another eon entirely, when she’d still been an undergrad, back before she’d quit smoking, before she’d gotten serious about her career, while she was still exploring the limitations of her own self-restraint…

 

_ She’d been standing for a while at the edge of a puddle of gasoline, gazing into its sickly dancing rainbows, breathing in its intoxicating fumes, thinking about nothing and everything. She knew she should probably walk away but somehow couldn’t find the motivation to move. Executive dysfunction or willful inaction? Did it matter? _

Loki said something else that she couldn’t quite hear around the memory, and Harleen looked blankly up at him, tilting her head curiously. She was distantly, apathetically aware that her pupils must be insanely dilated, because every feature of his face was etched out brightly in the moonlight. She stood half-lost with one foot in the past and one in the present, the two overlapping each other like misaligned realities.

_ Slowly, contemplatively, she’d gone to light a cigarette and accidentally-on-purpose let a few stray sparks drift down, just to see what it felt like. _

Without speaking, she lifted up on her toes and, almost experimentally, kissed Loki quietly -- nothing like the hard, hungry, lust-driven kisses they'd shared so far, but something gentler, more… vulnerable.

Just to see what it felt like.

He stiffened with almost an air of suspicion, but gave way after a moment, softening his lips against hers, tilting her face up with long, cold fingers to draw her into him.

_ The gas ignited, the flames roaring up inches from her face, and there was no putting it out now. _

It was more than just dangerous. ‘Danger’ implied uncertainty, the  _ potential _ for bad outcomes, the need for caution and care to avoid them. But the potential had already come and gone, evolving into a guaranteed bad bet, and she had willingly taken it.

_ Regret was pointless, and Harleen had no time for it. _

She had no idea if Loki felt the waves of heat coming off the conflagration, if he would ever reciprocate, if he even cared at all. She knew who he was,  _ what _ he was. She knew what to expect from him.

It changed nothing. There was nothing he could do about it, nothing she could do about it, nothing anyone could do about it now.

He’d wanted her to belong to him, didn’t he? It was only his own fault if he got more than he bargained for.

She was his.


	26. Chapter 26

Harleen drew her knees up in front of her and rested her chin on them as she watched Loki work.

“You’re staring again,” he commented acidly without looking up from the map he was unrolling and weighing down at the corners.

Harleen didn’t feel the least bit apologetic, but she couldn’t blame him for being annoyed, either. In the past few days -- she wasn’t sure how many now, and didn’t care -- she’d fallen into the habit of tracking him everywhere he went when he was around her. She felt sometimes like a time-lapse video of a sunflower, biologically compelled to constantly turn and face her sun as it moved around her.

“I’m trying to figure out what you’re doing,” she explained, honestly enough. That was  _ also  _ why she was watching him, after all.

Loki glanced up briefly from his papers and flashed her a wolfish smile. “What am I doing, then?”

Slipping off her seat, Harleen came up to join him at the table and studied his map, using the excuse to stand just a little closer to him than necessary.  _ That _ habit he didn’t seem to mind at all, resting a hand on her waist and sending a tingle racing up through her stomach and into her chest.

Taking a quick breath, Harleen re-focused her attention on the table in front of her. The map was really more of a star chart, but in an artistic, old-fashioned style, as if Christopher Columbus had been a space explorer. All the labels were written in runic, but Harleen wouldn’t have been in the least surprised if some of the notations on the edges warned that  _ here there be tygers  _ or  _ bylgesnypes  _ or something.

She  _ could _ decipher at least one of the labels, though -- in her explorations of the library, she’d seen the word for Asgard come up in enough recognizable contexts that it was familiar to her by now. So, she knew where  _ they _ were, but the rest was a mystery. The Asgardians seem to have some clever method of denoting three dimensions on paper in a much more complex and accurate way than humanity had come up with so far, and she hadn’t quite worked out how to interpret it yet.

Moving on to one of the other parchments Loki had already laid out, she found a slightly more readable map that seemed to be of Asgard itself. ‘Asgard,’ it turned out, was both the name of the whole planet or plane or whatever  _ and _ of the golden city that held Odin’s seat of power. No more confusing than New York, New York, really, but it had thrown Harleen for a loop in some of her earlier studies before she worked it out.

Loki had already scribbled over this one extensively. Harleen glanced briefly at his notes and labels to see if she could spot anything familiar, but nothing comprehensible stood out to her, so she focused instead on the arrows and connecting lines he’d drawn, searching for patterns.

“There,” she said finally, jabbing down at a point where some of the lines converged about halfway between the summer palace and the city. “There’s a wormhole or something there, and you’re trying to work out where it opens on the other end.”

Loki raised both eyebrows at her. “Worm-hole,” he repeated, enunciating both syllables delicately. Then he shook his head with amusement and bent back to his work. “Mortal colloquialisms never cease to delight me.”

“Am I right, then?” Harleen asked eagerly, watching the next notes he wrote on the star chart. “I’m right, aren’t I?” He didn’t answer, so she decided to take that as a ‘yes.’ “Why do you need a wormhole? Does it have something to do with Skurge’s note?”

“There is to be a Convergence in a little more than a year that I could use instead, but I would really rather not wait that long.”

That wasn’t much of an answer, but Harleen worked out the essential bits. “Why not use your +3 Pointy Stick of Teleportation to get wherever it is you’re going?”

Loki didn’t even bother giving her a Look that time. He seemed to have given up expecting her to speak sensibly when she went particularly  _ Midgardian _ at him. “If you’re referring to the scepter, that’s not really what it’s designed for. It’s more of a borrowed ability from its link with the Cube, but that link will not hold out indefinitely as long as the Cube remains lost.”

“It could fizzle out anytime and leave you stranded, gotcha,” she translated. “Where is it, by the way? I  _ know _ the one you’ve got downstairs isn’t real.”

He  _ did _ look skeptically back up at her now, with an expression that clearly read without words,  _ Do you really expect me to answer that? _

She didn’t, but that wasn’t going to stop her from trying to catch him distracted. Harleen shrugged innocently at him and changed the subject.

“No errands to run today?”

“They’re effectively running themselves at this point.” So, Thor and Odin were antagonizing each other enough without his help now. Well done, Loki. “Go now,” he said abruptly, pushing her away from the table with a smack on her ass. “I have much to do, and you’re proving a distraction.”

Harleen wasn’t surprised. Really, she hadn’t expected him to let her get away with bothering him with questions for as long has she already had, and she moved to return to her original seat.

“ _Go,_ ” he repeated, flicking his fingers at the door without looking up from his work. “That means  _ away. _ ” Harleen stuck her tongue out at him, but obediently left.

She didn’t go far. As soon as the door closed behind her, she dropped into a cross-legged seat on the floor, and began practicing again. The sparks came more easily now; she no longer felt like her head was going to explode with the effort, and she’d expanded her repertoire to include more abstractions in varying shades, and even the blurry, uncertain outlines of more concrete shapes.

Fire was her favorite. She’d always liked watching it to begin with, and she loved it more than ever now that she could summon the image at will. Fire was so forgiving; it didn’t matter if she got the colors wrong or had trouble hanging onto a set shape, because that could all be chalked up to the randomness of dancing flames. It always looked good, no matter what she did with it.

She called up a little ball of it now, still marveling at its complete absence of temperature or sensation in her hand. It was only wavelengths of light, after all, but that would still take a while to get used to. She stretched out her arm and the ball elongated and streaked up to her shoulder like an eager pet, circling a lap around her upper arm as it went. Harleen sighed happily and leaned against the wall, then dismissed the little fireball with a puff of imaginary smoke.

Hmm. The smoke still wasn’t quite looking right, its edges too angular and without enough gradient. She’d have to work on that. Leaning forward again, she whiled away the time playing with different colors and intensities of smoke clouds until the door opened and Loki nearly tripped over her, looking both unsurprised and mildly amused to find her in his way.

Harleen grinned unabashedly up at him and sprang to her feet. “Find what you were looking for?”

“After a manner of speaking,” he answered vaguely. “Would you care for a stroll?”

She eyed him, but didn’t see any sign of an ulterior motive, so walked with him down to the gardens, where they wandered aimlessly along the paths.

“The trees you mentioned seem to be flowering beautifully,” she mentioned in sly reference to their last coded conversation, putting a hand on Loki’s arm as they walked.

“They do, don’t they?” he responded with immense satisfaction.

A slightly concerning thought occurred to Harleen. “About how long do they stay in bloom?” she asked, adding just for cover, “I really don’t know a lot about Asgardian seasons.”

“Not long,” Loki answered. “Now that they’ve blossomed, they ought to begin bearing fruit any day now.” Her heart sank.

“And then what happens?”

He glanced down at her, and she glanced away, studying the nearest passing flower. “You’re unusually interested in… horticulture today.”

Harleen shrugged, a little defensively, and forced herself not to tighten her grip possessively on his arm. “Maybe I like the flowers. Maybe it just seems like a shame that they don’t last very long.”

Loki stopped and kissed her abruptly in the middle of the path, running the backs of his fingers down her warming cheek. Ice seemed to spread along her skin in their wake. “As lovely as the blossoms are, I can assure you, the fruit is far sweeter and will be  _ well _ worth their loss,” he said after a moment. “If I’m in a particularly giving mood, I may even share with you a taste.”

_ Does that mean…? It can’t possibly. What’s his angle, here? _

Harleen didn’t dare let herself hope that meant what she thought it did, but at the same time… what else  _ could _ it mean? Before she could search his face for answers, though, Loki had her pushed up against a low garden wall and was kissing her again. Her thoughts blurred together -- which was probably the idea, damn him -- and she gave up chasing them.

For the moment, all that mattered was kissing him. They melted down along the wall and into the soft grass where they rolled with tangled legs and wandering hands, play-fighting for dominance as they kissed. Harleen ended up on top when they rolled too close to a tree trunk to go any further, and she straddled him, knees digging into the dirt as she broke off from his lips and began moving her mouth down along his chest and stomach to keep kissing him through his shirt. Loki growled appreciatively and tugged his pants down around his hips, giving her access to continue moving her lips down until they met his swollen head.

Harleen had only just begun when a crack of lightning suddenly split the clear blue sky, followed in less than a split second by an enormous crash of thunder. Harleen’s shoulders gave a startled twitch, but Loki only scowled and sighed heavily

“Oh, fantastic timing,” he grumbled. He’d barely finished speaking when there was a minor explosion of grass and dirt nearby, and Thor -- the real Thor -- left a small crater in the lawn as he appeared there in a half-crouch, a cloud of sparks around his raised hammer.


	27. Chapter 27

“ _LOKI!_ ” Thor bellowed much more loudly than necessary, striding towards the palace and continuing to shout. He had apparently not been expecting to find his brother so quickly because he’d almost passed Loki and Harleen before he accidentally glanced at their way and then immediately averted his eyes.

“ _LOKI, I KNOW YOU ARE_ \-- oh, by the All-Father, I am so, so sorry!”

“‘Scuse you,” Harleen said irritably, freeing her mouth. “Kinda busy here.”

“Forgive me, brother, I had no idea you --” Harleen’s words seemed to take a moment to catch up with Thor, and he instinctively swiveled back towards the pair, eyes widening comically as he took in her decidedly un-Asgardian accent and word choice. “Was that --? Are you --? Is she --?” He looked astonishedly back and forth between their faces before remembering to turn away again, now raising one hand to shield his eyes.

Loki gave a resigned sigh and dismissed Harleen with a quick double-pat on her ass and a pointed look up at the palace. Grumbling, she swung herself off of him and began walking back up the path, brushing past Thor without a second glance but giving Loki a look that promised to pick up where they left off later.

She stopped the moment she was out of sight, though, making herself comfortable behind a nearby statue. If Loki was expecting her not to eavesdrop on a conversation like this, he was even crazier than she’d given him credit for. Besides, it would be harder work to  _ not _ hear Thor as he exploded at his brother.

“This is the worst kind of hypocrisy, Loki! After all the scorn and insults you’ve piled upon  _ me _ for Jane, and now I find  _ you _ \--”

“I cautioned you against giving your  _ heart _ to a mortal, o brother mine.” Loki’s voice was softer, but Harleen could still make it out with strained ears. “I said nothing of your manhood. Do as you will; just do not involve me.” Harleen put a hand to her mouth to cover a snicker, but Thor was apparently less entertained.

“That’s all she is to you, then? Does  _ she _ know that?”

“I would assume so.”

Loki assumed correctly. It was misguidedly sweet of Thor to get so offended on Harleen’s behalf, but she didn’t need Loki’s heart. She had  _ him _ , and that was enough for now. And she would deal with later… later.

“Does she love you?” Thor demanded.

“I would assume so,” Loki repeated. He was beginning to sound bored with the conversation. “Did you truly come all this way to lecture me about how I choose to amuse myself?”

“No, I --” Reminded what he was  _ originally _ mad about, Thor’s voice rose again. “What in the name of Yggdrasil’s branches are you doing back here after what you’ve done?!”

“What I have done…?” Loki sounded mystified for a moment, and Harleen recognized the same ‘that little kerfuffle’ routine he’d given her back at S.H.I.E.L.D. “Oh! Back on Midgard, you mean? Brother, that was  _ months _ ago. Are you still angry about that?”

“ _Do not_ start, Loki,” Thor growled. “Do you not truly feel the gravity of your crimes? I’ll no longer stand by as you--”

“As you stood by when you left me to the mortals’ tender mercies, you mean?” The words were so low Harleen had to risk leaning around the statue to catch them. She couldn’t see Loki from her position, but could get most of Thor’s face, only partially obscured behind some branches. Unlike his adopted brother, he was an open book. Harleen caught guilt and anger and defiance and shame chasing each other across his features before she slipped back into hiding.

“I had to make a choice,” he answered. “I knew you could look after yourself for a short while, and…” He faltered, apparently doubting if he should say the next part, especially in light of the Tesseract’s theft, but then decided to forge on. “And I could not risk the Cube falling into the wrong hands. For all your petty schemes, I thought its destructive potential to far outweigh yours.”

There was a pause, and then Loki hissed icily, “You were mistaken.”

“I am truly sorry, brother,” Thor said earnestly. “But you should not have returned. When Father learns of --”

Loki’s laughter rang out across Thor’s words. “Was it not he who told you of my return?” he asked with delighted disbelief. “Oh, that  _ is _ rich!”

“No, my friends on Earth found a way to --” Thor began before the full weight of Loki’s question occurred to him. “Does he already know? How long have you been here?”

“Some seven days now,” Loki answered freely. “I cannot imagine  _ why _ he would not have shared news of such import with you directly.”

Thor sounded awkward and a little defensive. “We have… not been getting on well of late.”

“You have my sincerest sympathies,” Loki deadpanned, clearly anything but sincere or sympathetic. “Pray tell, what could possibly have severed such a close bond?”

“I don’t know! Every time I feel we’re reaching some understanding, he finds some other criticism to heap upon me, then behaves as though  _ I’m _ being unreasonable! I can’t make head nor tail of it, and Mother refuses to hear either side, and --”

“I always knew her to be the wisest of you three,” Loki murmured, and Thor must have remembered who he was confiding in, because he broke off. Thousand-year-old habits must die hard.

“It matters not,” he said gruffly. “I know not why he continues to harangue me over trifles, nor why he refuses to hear my strategies for the Cube’s search, nor why he has apparently let  _ you _ run wild across our realm all this time, but he is the All-Father and I must trust my king to do what is right.”

“How very loyal of you,” Loki said placidly. “You truly have learned from your time on Midgard, haven’t you?”

“That makes one of us,” Thor snapped. “I will return.” There was another crack of thunder and then the garden was quiet once more. Harleen stood and leaned against the statue, studiously examining her nails until Loki strolled over. As she’d predicted, he didn’t look the least bit surprised or offended to find her that close.

“You would have had a better view from the other side of the fountain,” he pointed out.

“Nice try,” she said with dignity. “I couldn’t have heard a damn thing there.” Harleen leaned up for a kiss, putting her arms around Loki’s neck. “Now, where were we…?”

He kissed her back, but then pushed her away. “No time for that now, kitten. My dear brother played his part a little sooner than I anticipated, and there is much now to be done in a very short time.”

He set off with long strides, and Harleen hurried after him.

“What do we need to do?”

“Again with this ‘we’ business?” he asked drily. “Don’t tell me you’re getting bored again; I really can’t spare the attention to indulge you right now.”

“Hey!” Taking several steps for every one of his, she managed to catch Loki’s arm and tug him around to face her. “I mean it! There has to be some way I can help.”

Loki laughed and shook her off him. “You wish to help?” he asked skeptically, continuing onwards. Harleen couldn’t quite tell if he was doubting the sincerity of the offer or just doubting that she could be helpful at all, but she was offended either way.

Putting on another burst of speed, she planted herself directly in Loki’s path, forcing him to a stop, and stared up at him. Holding his gaze, trying to make him see how deadly serious she was, she said, “I would do anything for you. You know that, right?”

His cat-with-the-canary smile, her favorite of his many, many smiles, crept into the corners of Loki’s mouth, his eyes narrowing with calculated amusement, and he finally stopped. “ _ Anything? _ ” he asked.

The word was loaded with more connotations than Harleen could count, much less name, but it didn’t matter. The answer was the same, and it came without a moment’s hesitation. “Anything.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, guys! There won't be an update next Friday the 11th -- partially because my birthday's this week :D, and partially because the chapter I'm currently working on has been a royal son-of-a-bitch to get through, so I'm a little more behind than I'd like to be and want to grab some more catch-up time. Regular updates will resume on the 18th!


	28. Chapter 28

“Loki… When I said ‘ _ anything _ …’” Harleen began in a warning tone.

“Which you did,” he was quick to remind her.

She blew a stray strand of hair out of her face and glowered at him as he fussed around with the boat’s moorings. “For the record, I have an IQ of 158,” Harleen informed him, swiveling in her seat to track Loki’s progress around the boat.

“Mmm.” A rope landed at her feet, and Harleen kicked at it irritably.

“I completed my PhD  _ years _ early. Literal years. I had colleagues who’d barely started their prospectus while I was defending my dissertation  _ and _ finishing my second Master’s. The time management alone --”

“How nice for you.” If any of that meant anything to Loki, he still clearly didn’t care.

“I was a  _ nationally-ranked _ gymnast in high school. I could have gone Olympic if I hated myself enough.”

“You must be very proud.”

“ _ My point is _ that I am  _ awesome _ , Mr. L. And apparently, the  _ best possible use _ you can find for my many diverse talents…” She paused to draw breath and intensify her glare at the completely-unaffected god as she finished flatly. “...is to play bait. Again.”

Loki himself landed in the boat next,vaulting over the side as he pushed off and hitting her with one of his stupid, perfect, argument-ending smiles.

“Don’t think of it as ‘bait,’ kitten. Think of it as…” He waved a hand airly, taking his customary seat by the rudder. “Diversionary tactics potentially requiring both agility and wits.”

Harleen snorted and folded her arms across the Asgardian dress she was wearing. “Decorate it however you like; I’m still the bait.” The boat rose into the air sooner than it had last time, almost as soon as they’d cleared the cave’s mouth -- he must have been waiting until the last moment just to be an asshole before -- so she kept talking to keep her mind off their flight. “How do you know Captain Hammer’s going to go all  _ Sons of Liberty _ for us, anyway? He sounded pretty damn loyal to Daddy Dearest back there.”

“That’s the wonderfully predictable thing about my brother,” Loki said. “He remains absolutely sure of his convictions until the exact moment he becomes absolutely sure of something else. Naturally, I could not openly suggest rebellion -- even dear Thor would see through that from miles off, were it to come from me -- but he shall get there on his own now that the wheels have finally begun spinning. To his mind, Asgard is in danger from an ineffectual king refusing to act upon threats from multiple fronts; for all he has learned, Thor still has trouble understanding that judicious inaction can be action of itself when one takes the long view. He won’t  _ like _ it, of course, but when forced into a decision between king and country, he will do what he believes must be done for the sake of his people, and the resulting upheaval will create a vulnerable -- why are you laughing?”

“ _ You! _ ” Harleen giggled, hands over her mouth. “You’re monologuing! Think I don’t recognize one when I hear it, after all the spiels I’ve had to sit through over the years? Please, don’t let me interrupt. Do continue telling me all about your brilliant, evil plan. Maybe work in some maniacal laughter with a conveniently-timed thunderclap?”

Despite her teasing, she couldn’t really blame Loki for finally taking the chance to speak openly. The riddles and metaphors could be fun, but it really didn’t matter anymore what Heimdall might or might not overhear.

Loki scowled out at the darkening sky around them. “If there is thunder to be heard, things have gone very wrong extraordinarily quickly,” he said, either missing the point or simply refusing to be drawn in.

Harleen did her best to resume a serious expression and persisted, taking advantage of his talkative mood while she had it. “What happens if he fails, then? I wouldn’t take any bets on  _ that _ fight, if it came down to it.”

He shrugged lazily. “It matters not. Thor’s victory would be preferable, but either outcome will suffice. In the unlikely event he should actually prevail in forcing Odin off the throne, then it will be held by one easily outwitted and my task will be simple. Should he fail, Odin will have no choice but to banish him once more, and I do not believe that even the All-Father realizes how much he relies upon his  _ favored son _ .”

Loki plainly meant the words to sound scornful, but Harleen heard the bitterness and pain in them all too clearly. With a resolved focus on the bottom of the boat, she risked movement just long enough to dart the short distance from stem to stern, where she settled onto the boat’s floor at Loki’s feet. As she leaned her head on his knee to provide silent support, he absently stroked her damp hair and continued.

“When last he sent Thor away, a few sharp words were enough to send him into the Odinsleep. He will be stronger now, well-rested, capable of holding the throne against me, but all I require for the moment is Gungnir. He shall be sufficiently weakened for that much, I believe, and the throne will be easily won once I’ve… settled a few other matters.”

“And when you have the spear? What do you plan on doing with it?”

Loki glanced down as if faintly surprised to find her there, in spite of the hand still resting on her head. “Hadn’t you ought to be preparing? There is little light left and little time before we arrive.”

Harleen sighed heavily. Well, it had been nice to get some straight answers while it lasted. “You could do it quicker than me,” she pointed out, straightening.

“As you’re so insistent upon making yourself useful, I suggest you take the opportunity to practice,” he replied, so she grumbled and pulled herself up onto the seat across from him.

There were still a few lingering finger-marks around her wrists and upper arms from the other night. Harleen took a moment to enjoy the memories tied to them, then touched them lightly one by one, willing a darker overlay onto each one, filling in and freshening every bruise, plus adding a few more for drama.

The dress -- a dainty pale blue that wasn’t really her color, but lent her a sense of innocence and vulnerability -- was already genuinely torn up, mostly with long rips up the skirt to give her more freedom of movement if she needed to make a quick getaway, but with one nice tear down the collar to give a good view of her cleavage.

Her face would be the trickiest part, and it was more important she get it right, since that’s where she’d be most closely observed. Reaching into her pocket --  _ Asgardian dresses have pockets! Real ones! If ever there were a sign of a more advanced civilization, this must be it _ \-- she withdrew a hand mirror Loki had dug up somewhere for her, and stared into it, running a finger along her brow and her jaw and leaving dark smudges of dirt and blood and bruises in its wake.

“You  _ are _ aware that you don’t need to actually move your hands around, yes?” Loki commented, watching her.

“It helps me concentrate,” Harleen replied testily without looking away from the mirror, trying to keep him from breaking her focus. “Unlike you.”

“It’s inefficient,” he grumbled, but didn’t directly order her  _ not _ to, so Harleen kept doing it her own way.

Creating the illusion of realistic swelling was a lot harder than simple color changes. Harleen had never considered herself much of an artist, and there were all sorts of factors of dimension and shadow to consider, but she thought she did a reasonable job imitating the aftermath of a fairly savage beating. The whole image tended to blur slightly when she let her concentration lapse, but hopefully in the night and the flickering firelight, any such lapses would go unnoticed.

_ Going to save a small fortune on concealer if I get the hang of this. _ In one final spark of inspiration, she filled in a faint pink around the whites of her eyes and erased a few lines in the “dirt” on her cheeks, leaving tear tracks runnelling down.

“Well?” she asked at last, lowering the mirror.

Loki leaned forward in his seat and studied her critically, reaching out both hands to lightly nudge her into looking to the left and right. Harleen almost lost the illusion completely at his touch and the intensity of his closeness.

“Focus, kitten,” he murmured, and she took a deep breath and restabilized it, still acutely aware of his scent and the feel of his fingertips. “Imperfect, but acceptable,” was the final generous assessment.

“What’s not right?” Harleen asked, eager to perfect it.

Loki took the mirror from her and held it up so she could see where he pointed. “For realism, you’ll want to extend these lines to about  _ there _ , and the discoloration over here is a bit… much.  _ This _ bump looks all right straight on, but its shape becomes somewhat distorted as you move. That will be rather difficult to make right with your present abilities, so for now, I advise adding something darker  _ here _ \-- more blood, perhaps -- to distract the eye, rather than trying to correct it entirely.”

Harleen took the mirror back to make the changes he suggested just as they pulled up alongside the cliffs below Asgard, and had to admit the overall effect was much better. They docked the boat and went quickly and quietly up the narrow staircase and back into the alley. The square was busier than Harleen would have expected for this time in the evening -- even more crowded than it had been the last time she’d come with Loki to the city, with a worryingly high percentage of golden-helmed guards and soldiers.

As they approached the mouth of the alley, she noticed all the people were, for the most part, standing still, and staring up at a point somewhere over their heads. “Hold,” Loki said abruptly, thrusting an arm out to block her way.

Harleen stopped, just in time for a shower of dust and roof tiles to rain around the entrance as two figures came crashing down into the square, the crowd drawing back with scattered screams to stay well clear of their struggle. The guards encouraged them backwards, putting themselves on the front lines of the crowd, clearly more concerned with keeping their citizens safe from the fight than with getting themselves involved.

Harleen couldn’t blame them. Only a fool would try getting between Thor and Odin, furiously fighting each other in the middle of the city.


	29. Chapter 29

Thor and Odin grappled with each other, both out of breath, both looking enraged. It was clear they’d been fighting for some time, and equally clear neither of them had made any headway to speak of.

Thor extended his arm, Mjolnir bursting through a nearby wall to fly into his outstretched hand, and he swung the hammer at his father, who dodged and fired back with a golden lance of energy, which also missed and caused another frantic part in the crowd as people dived out of its way.

“Did the fool actually allow his little  _ coup _ to escalate into open combat?” Loki demanded in an angry whisper. “What am I saying? Of course he did. Why would he not? When in his life has he taken the sensible approach? Although what, precisely, he hopes to gain by  _ openly _ challenging the All-Father when even his victory would be met by his own death at the hands of a hundred others…” He continued in this vein long enough for Harleen to wonder if he even realized he was speaking aloud. Grumbling to himself wasn’t one of his  _ usual _ habits.

The fight raged on. Odin had broken away from Thor, ducked out of Mjolnir’s path as it went flying again, and aimed another energy blast, this time at a wall near where they’d fallen from the roofs. The wall shook, sending down another rain of tiles along with a golden spear that only bore a faint resemblance to the one drawn in the coffee table book. Both men dived for the weapon, each struggling to reach it before the other.

A tall figure at the back of the crowd on the far side of the square caught Harleen’s eye, although no one around him seemed to give him any notice. “This is madness!” he was roaring, unheard or unheeded around the din, as he fought his way slowly through the throng. Even from this distance, the striking golden color of his eyes was notable in the torchlight. “Can you not both see you have been deceived? Stop this at once, and  _ listen! _ ”

Loki noticed him too, and smirked slightly. “Best end this quick, then. Fortune smiles upon you this once, brother, though she will not smile long.”

Just then, Odin managed to seize Gungnir away from Thor, kicking him hard in the chest so the two flew apart from one another and gave him the space he needed to wind up his spear arm. Thor stumbled sideways, shoulders heaving with exhaustion, and looked up just in time to see the ever-accurate spear… miss by a matter of several feet.

He was clearly as stunned as anyone in the watching crowd, though none more so than Odin, who stared in open shock as Gungnir flew through empty air to clatter harmlessly against a far building and fall to the ground. A hush fell over the square, both feuding gods apparently rooted to the spot. Even Heimdall paused in his struggle to watch for what they would do next.

“Father,” Thor began, putting a hand out towards Odin and clearly about to initiate some sort of truce.

Odin, however, wasn’t looking at him, but was instead glaring off in the same direction he’d thrown the spear, eyes fixed on a point of empty space there.

“How dare you?” he demanded, quietly enough that he could only be heard by the nearest line of onlookers and by Harleen and Loki in their accidental front-row seats. Then, abruptly, he bellowed at the top of his voice, “ _ HOW DARE YOU stand there and LAUGH at ME? _ How dare ANY of you?” He swung around to point an accusing finger in a semi-circle across the square, passing over the baffled Thor without apparent notice.

Whispers and murmurs began to rise out of the stunned silence.

“Who’s laughing?”

“What’s he pointing at?”

“The king’s gone mad.”

That last caught on and rippled through the crowd, word of the All-Father’s mental breakdown spreading like wildfire. Harleen looked curiously up at Loki, who had crept to the very edges of the shadow and was staring intently at his adopted father, chest rising and falling with labored, shallow breath and sweat beading on his forehead.

_ That’s not an illusion, at least not one anyone else can see. Is Loki actually fucking with his mind directly?  _ Nothing like  _ that _ had been in Loki’s file, but he was clearly doing  _ something _ . The effort obviously cost him, though -- Harleen could only assume that getting through the defenses of the most powerful god in Asgard wasn’t exactly a picnic on the beach.

Odin was still responding furiously to whatever it was only he could hear from Thor and the arrayed citizens. “Am I a  _ joke _ to you, then?! Do you think me to have grown old and feeble and worthy of such low mockery? I am  _ the ALL-FATHER! I will show you!  _ I will show  _ ALL  _ of you!” Odin began raising both hands, and Harleen caught a brief ‘oh, shit’ expression cross Thor’s face before he charged his father at a run.

Odin didn’t seem to see him coming, still fixated on the imaginary version Loki had given him. He had no way to defend himself when Thor tackled him, throwing him to the ground with his arms pinned at his sides. The guards rushed forward to his aid, and their combined strength kept him restrained long enough to hurry him out of public view, still raging and screaming at imagined insults.

Thor caught the elbow of the nearest guard and exchanged a few quiet words with him. “Not the dungeons,” Harleen could just hear. “Not his rooms, either. Best Mother not see him like this. Use mine for now; I'll attend him shortly.”

Loki had slumped against the alley wall as soon as Odin disappeared, and Harleen ignored the rest of the conversation to put herself at his side, supporting him with a shoulder under his arm. She was both gratified and worried when he leaned on her without arguing about it, but he didn’t seem to be anything worse than deeply exhausted.

Thor hung back long enough to address the square, still breathing hard with exertion, but only a little tremor audible in his carrying voice. “My father is… not well,” he said unnecessarily, clearly unused to having to choose his words carefully. “Until we can… tend to what ails him, I will be… adopting the duties of the crown.”

“Oh, what a burden,” Loki murmured, never too weak for sarcasm, then glanced at Harleen. “You’re blurring,” he said sharply, and she jumped and remembered to focus back on her own illusions, having gotten entirely distracted by the fight and its aftermath.

“Now then,” he began, pushing back up off the wall with a little grunt as Thor finished his awkward speech and the crowd dispersed. “We have set the stage with our preferred actor, but the play has not yet begun. Are you prepared to do your part?”

“Yes, my lord,” Harleen replied immediately, excitement thumping in her chest.

“And you are  _ sure _ you know the way?”

“ _ Yes, _ ” she repeated, a little impatiently. He’d sure as hell made her study the map of the city enough times.

“And if Thor --”

“Stop  _ fussing _ , Mr. L!” Harleen interrupted. “You’ve gone over  _ every possible scenario _ that could theoretically come up, short of… I don’t know, machete-wielding bears flying in through the windows. And if he  _ still _ manages to do something unexpected…” She gave a little shrug. “I’ll improvise.”

Loki’s mouth quirked with amusement. “And what, pray tell, will you improvise should such creatures arrive?”

“Shove Thor at the nearest one and run like hell?”

He laughed and pulled her in to kiss the top of her head. “Very well, then, very well. Go meet your curtain. I shall do my best to prevent winged bears  _ or _ all-seeing busybodies from interrupting the performance.”

Harleen giggled, lifted up on her toes to kiss him, and darted away to do her part.


	30. Chapter 30

She found Thor sitting alone in the throne room with his elbows on his knees, Mjolnir dangling from one hand and Gungnir gripped loosely in the other. Only a few of the braziers closest to the throne were lit to push back the darkness around him; they haloed the image of a man with much on his mind and no idea what to do about it as he looked from one weapon to the other.

Harleen briefly considered feeling sorry for him, but he had only brought it on himself, really. Loki might have had some pointed contributions to his feud with Odin, but nobody had  _ made _ Thor handle the situation like a bull blindly charging the nearest target. That was all on him.

So she schooled her expression, wrapped an arm tightly around her stomach as if in pain, and crept forward out of the darkness with a small noise that made her inwardly cringe at its pathetic mousiness. Distracted by his own thoughts, Thor’s response was delayed, and she had to give him a louder sniffle before he abruptly looked up to see her.

Surprise, confusion, and concern ran transparently across his face, finally followed by --  _ there it is! _ \-- anger. Harleen knew Thor’s type, and didn’t need Loki to have told her that his two biggest blind spots would be nobility and rage. Mix them up together, give him a wrong to right, and let him work himself up into a good righteous fury about it, and his brain wouldn’t remember where it had left itself until he’d saved the day and made somebody pay. Child’s play.

“I-- I’m sorry,” she stammered, letting her legs wobble and give way so she fell forward onto her knees.  _ Ow. _ Harleen really needed to work on her falls. Still, the pain added a nice, authentic breathiness to her voice as she whispered, “I didn’t know where else to go.”

Thor swore vehemently and rushed down the shallow steps leading from the throne, leaving both weapons behind him. Give the prince credit; he didn’t hesitate for a second in getting right down on his knees too, reaching out a helping hand to her.

Harleen flinched back from it with a whimper, letting him get one good look at her face before ducking her head down to keep him from looking  _ too _ closely.

“Who  _ did _ such a --” Thor began, then cut himself off as he remembered suddenly, “I’ve seen you before! You’re Loki’s…” There was an awkward pause as he flailed about for a tactful way to end that sentence, but it gave Harleen enough to work with.

“Not anymore,” she sniffed angrily, dragging a gauzy sleeve across her nose, then folding her hands on her knees before he could see that it came away dry.

Thor blanched. “He didn’t --?”

“No,” Harleen answered. She and Loki had gone back and forth over that point for some time, but eventually decided that, although it  _ would _ be the fastest way to incite Thor’s fury, the plausibility factor was stretched too far. Such overt violence was too out-of-character for even Thor to believe of Loki. “But he didn’t  _ do _ anything, either,” she continued weepily. “He didn’t even care! Just said I’d ‘served my purpose,’ and whatever else happened was ‘none of his concern.’”

Now,  _ that _ Thor could accept with no doubt whatsoever. Harleen caught sight of one fist clenching out of the corner of her eye, and decided to give him one final nudge. “I thought he lo-- lo-- lov--” The fake sobbing was making it hard for her to focus consistently on the illusion, so she buried her face in her hands until she could get it back under control.

Thor rose to his feet, red cloak rippling impressively in the firelight from what she could see between her fingers. “I will speak with him,” he declared in a tone that implied he expected there to be very little  _ speaking _ involved, and Harleen rolled her eyes behind her hands.  _ Good god, hasn’t he picked enough fights for one night? _ “It is past time my brother learned that Midgardians aren’t his playthings to do with as he will.”

“No, don’t!” she begged, hoping the shrill note of terror in her voice wasn’t overdone. Harleen jumped up, remembering only just in time to wince and curl her arm back around herself. He didn’t seem to notice anyway, which seemed a bit rude to her; she could have broken ribs or internal bleeding for all he knew!

_Concentrate, Harley_. His focus on the broad strokes of heroism and lack of attention to the details was a _benefit_ , she had to remind herself. Acting could be fun, but had never really been her forte, and now was not the time to start taking an inattentive audience personally. She pushed the conversation back on track again, trying to work out the quickest way to point it where she wanted to go. “Please, I just want to go home. You must have some way to get back to Earth, don’t you?” 

Cue the puppy eyes, the lip-wobble, the heartbreaking plea for what she knew full well Thor couldn’t provide.

“I wish I could,” he said regretfully, “but with the bridge broken and the Cube gone…”

Well, that was easier than anticipated. Harleen had expected to have to go through a lot more subtle coaxing before he brought the Tesseract up, and she jumped on the subject before he got himself sidetracked.

“Cube?” she asked with wide-eyed curiosity.

“An ancient relic, only recently retrieved from your world,” he explained distractedly. “We could have used it to repair the Bifrost, but it was stolen again from us. I suspected Loki, but --”

Was the idiot actually going to give her its  _ entire _ recent backstory?  _ No wonder Odin doesn’t trust him with any  _ **_real_ ** _ state secrets. _

“Is it blue? Kind of glowy?” she interrupted, trying to sound more eager than impatient.

Thor’s eyes grew wide with shock. “You’ve seen it? Loki  _ does _ possess it, then?”

“It’s what he…” Harleen let a pause hang on the air for a beat, then finished bitterly, “… _ traded _ me for.”

The fist clenched again, this time coupled with a twitch in Thor’s jaw. “Do you know where he is now?” he asked urgently.

Time to tap the brakes a little, throw up a token wall of reluctance. Couldn’t make it too obvious,  _ too _ easy. “I…” she began, then hesitated and shook her head frantically. It was a calculated risk -- she wasn’t nearly good enough yet to make sure the bruises kept up with the motion correctly -- but Thor was staring grimly out across the room, his mind on Loki and not on her, and she doubted he would notice.

“I can’t go back there! Please don’t make me! He’ll -- I don’t know what he’ll do if he sees me again, but --”

“I know it’s frightening,” Thor said gently, turning his attention back to her to take her by the shoulders and look her intently in the face. Harleen took a deep breath as though gulping back another sob, using it to make sure her illusions were as clear and focused as she could make them, and stared back at him. “But you must understand, the fates of multiple worlds depend on that Cube. I  _ must _ know where he’s taking it. Can you take me to him? You have my word that I will protect you, whatever the cost.”

“Do you promise?” she asked tremulously.

Thor nodded gravely. “I swear that no further harm will come to you this night.”

Harleen let him twist in the wind for another moment, then slowly, carefully mirrored his nod. “I can show you,” she said, taking a step backward and holding out a hand.

Thor took it, his hand huge and rough around hers, and reached his other hand behind him for Mjolnir to sail into. Leaning heavily on his arm like she needed the support, Harleen led him out through the enormous doors and into the night, Gungnir leaning forgotten against the throne behind them.

 

They walked along in silence for a bit as Harleen led Thor through darkened city streets she had only ever seen on paper. The night was quiet, most Asgardians clinging to the illusion of safety behind their front doors after the turmoil of the evening.

“How did my brother convince you to come all the way here, anyway?” Thor asked suddenly into the stillness.

“Why do you want to know?” Harleen asked suspiciously, then winced slightly.  _ Dammit. _ She had let her guard slip a little during the lull, allowed herself to fall out of character just a bit.  _ Right. Small talk. That’s a thing people do. Not  _ **_everybody_ ** _ has fifteen different ulterior motives behind every question, Harley. _

He gave her an odd look, and she turned away as if embarrassed and added, “Sorry. It’s just… it’s personal. I don’t want to talk about it.”

Not a bad recovery. Let him puzzle  _ that _ one out.

“Very well, then,” Thor said respectfully, though his curiosity about it was painfully obvious now.

Probably best not to let him get thinking  _ too _ hard, so she decided to keep him talking. Besides, she’d probably be able to get more about Loki out of him in about five minutes than she’d gotten from Loki himself since the day they’d met.

“So, he’s your brother? You don’t look very similar.”

“He’s adopted,” Thor explained shortly. Harleen waited patiently for him to get to the good stuff, but the font of oversharing seemed to have run dry.

_Oh, come on! Don’t start holding out on me **now.**_ “But you grew up together?” she persisted.

“We were raised as blood. He is still my brother, but I fear he does not see it that way. I was exiled to Midgard at the time his parentage came to light, but I don’t believe he took it well.”

_ That’s one way of putting it. _ Still, Thor was already proving useful; Harleen had had no idea how recently Loki had discovered his adoption. He’d always given her the impression -- probably intentionally -- that he’d been brought up knowing who he was. No wonder the god was still touchy about the subject.

“And then did --”

“Hold!” Thor cut her off, stepping in front of her with an outthrust arm exactly the way Loki had back in the alley. Funny how those little family resemblances tended to pop up, adoption or no. The brothers probably had a lot more in common than either of them liked to admit.

“What is it?” she asked, peering out from behind him with feigned fearfulness. There’d better not be any complications popping up  _ now! _ They were in the home stretch and she wasn’t sure how much longer she could hold the stupid injuries in place. She had never sustained an illusion for this long before, and it was starting to give her a killer headache.

“Something’s not right. There’s somebody --” Thor whirled, hammer raised, back towards the mouth of the street they’d just turned down, putting himself between her and a figure running towards them in the darkness.

The man slowed as he approached, holding out empty hands so show he meant no harm. He was breathing heavily, and there was a shallow gash along one side of his forehead, and scrapes on both palms. “Please, Thor, stop; you must listen!”

_Well, shit._

Even if she hadn’t seen him from across the square during Thor’s battle with Odin, Harleen would have recognized Heimdall’s orange-tinted eyes anywhere.


	31. Chapter 31

_Dammit, Loki. This was_ **_your_ ** _job!_ There was fear mixed in with the irritation, but Harleen couldn’t let herself acknowledge it right now. Heimdall had obviously escaped, but that didn’t mean Loki wasn’t okay. He was fine. He had to be. She still had her own job to do.

“Thor, listen to me!” Heimdall was saying urgently, palms pressing down like he was trying to calm an angry bear.

“I had to; you know I did!” Thor argued preemptively, grip tightening on his hammer as he eyed Heimdall suspiciously. “No one wishes to believe more in my father than I, but he was leading us into ruin, sitting idly by as the wolves gathered at our doorstep! And you saw how he was at the end, there; something is plainly wrong, and somebody had to do _something!_ I had to --”

“ _Will you LISTEN?_ ” Heimdall interrupted angrily. “Open your eyes, man! It’s Loki; he’s played you and Odin both for fools and now you’re walking int--”

“I _knew_ it! The madness in Father’s eyes was Loki’s doing, through and through.” Thor straightened his shoulders with assurance. “He shall pay, though -- never fear, old friend! I’ve received word that he is near, and we go now to corner him in his den. Will you join us?”

“That’s what I’m _trying to tell you!_ ” The watcher roared with frustration. “It is not _he_ who shall be cornered. You’re permitting yourself to be led about by the nose while his little Midgardian urchin is taking you straight into his trap!”

Thor turned to look down in surprise at Harleen, who stared back with as much innocence and confusion as she could muster.

“Thor, who’s this?” she asked, concentrating fiercely to make sure she still wasn’t blurring. This would be a very, very bad time to slip. “What’s he talking about?”

The headache was getting worse. Harleen felt something warm above her lip and realized a small nosebleed was starting to bead there. That probably wasn’t a good sign, but at least it would lend her a touch of verisimilitude for the moment.

“You’re speaking nonsense, Heimdall,” Thor said, turning back to the other man. “Just look at her! She’s been as wronged by Loki as any of us; why would she aide him now?”

“Do not be taken in by her lies,” Heimdall warned. “She’s as bad as he is, can you not see that? All this week, I have seen them and their sche--”

“Ah, you have not heard!” Thor relaxed immediately, clapping Heimdall on the shoulder as if the matter were settled. “Yes, she _was_ allied with him, but just earlier this eve, he turned his treachery ’pon her. She has learned too well of his deceitful ways and now requires our aid, and in return can bring us both Loki _and_ the stolen Cube! Is that not marvelous?”

It was actually somewhat fortunate that Harleen was scared for Loki, worried for her own sake, distracted by the pain in her head, still fighting to keep the illusion from breaking, and frankly starting to get a little pissed-off at the patronizing way they were both talking about her like she weren’t even there. If she hadn’t been, she might have had to work a lot harder not to laugh outright at the Heimdall’s expression he took in Thor’s determined obliviousness -- as it was, she still had to struggle to keep a straight face.

“ _She is DECEIVING YOU!_ ” he bellowed, pointing an accusatory finger at Harleen who clung to Thor’s sleeve and shrunk behind him. “She is _still Loki’s creature_ , and you’re following her blindly precisely where he wishes you to go!”

“Thor, why is he yelling at me?” she whimpered. “I was wrong to follow Loki before, but I know that now. I just want to help you catch him!”

“Thor, listen to reason!”

“Thor, I’m scared!”

“Thor --”

 _“SILENCE,_ both of you!” The god finally roared, stepping away from Harleen to put himself at equal distance between the two of them, one hand held out to ward off each. “Now --” He leveled his hammer to point at Heimdall. “Do you have any proof of what you say?”

“Are my centuries of loyalty to the throne of Asgard not proof enough? Am I not one of your oldest and truest friends? Have I ever once led you astray?”

“So, that’s a ‘no,’ then.” That was probably a little too sarcastic for the shrinking violet Harleen was supposed to be portraying, but it just slipped out. The bead of blood from her nose had grown into a small trickle, and it was getting harder to fight through the headache well enough to sustain the illusion _and_ stay in character; one way or another, she was going to lose grip on something, and soon.

The hammer swung around to point at her next. “And do _you_ have proof that you are not still working for my brother?”

“You said it yourself! Why would I be helping him after what he did to me?!”

“Another dearth of evidence, then,” Heimdall cut in, glowering directly at her. Thor’s head was turned back towards him as he spoke, so Harleen crossed her eyes and stuck out her tongue. Heimdall’s eyes narrowed severely, but she was all innocence again by the time Thor looked back at her.

The antics relieved some of her tension, but she still needed to move this little interruption along, and fast.

“Thor, I don’t know why he’s so set against me, and I don’t know how else I can prove myself, but we don’t have time for this,” she pleaded. “I don’t know how much longer Loki will stay where he is now. I don’t know what he plans on doing, but I know he wanted to move fast as soon as he got the Tesseract, and he might... not...” _Shit. Please don’t notice that. Please don’t_ \--

But it was too late. She’d already faltered, drawn attention to the mistake, and Thor was eying her with suspicion while Heimdall indulged in a small smile behind him.

“Tesseract? You seem to know rather more about the Cube than you did back in the throne room,” Thor suggested dangerously.

She could still do this. She could recover. She could come up with _something_ \-- Oh, fuck it. Her head was hurting too much to spin a cover story out of thin air, and Heimdall would probably only pick it apart anyway. It was past time for Plan B.

“ _Fine_ ,” she grumbled, letting the illusions flicker and disperse, leaving behind relatively clean and uninjured arms and face. The release of pressure in her head was immediate and exhilarating, and she heaved a great sigh of relief as she wiped away some of the nosebleed with the back of one hand. “Now we get to do this the hard way. I hope you’re both happy, _jerks!_ ”

Harleen punctuated the last word with a vicious stomp on the startled Thor’s foot, and then took off at a sprint before either of them could react. Chasing her down or strolling side-by-side, what did it matter, as long as Thor was still following where _she_ wanted to go? Of course, she’d have to find a way to ditch Heimdall en route, but she’d manage as long as she could stay ahead of them.

Shouts and heavy footsteps followed her. Harleen was fast, for a human, but would never beat a pair of Asgardians in an even race, so it was time to get creative. Low, narrow walls lined both sides of the street, sheltering neighborhoods beyond and she shot for the left-hand one at a sharp angle, leaping up and running along it like a balance beam until she came to a tree branch sturdy enough to hoist herself up onto the nearest roof. Asgardian roofs were steeply arched, but she could handle it as long as she could see the ground and stay in control of where she stepped.

Scrambling up to the peak, she braced herself there and turned back to look at the street. Thor and Heimdall were gesticulating urgently at each other, Thor apparently ordering Heimdall to double back around to the next street over while he looked for the next opening, trying to catch her in a pincer further ahead.

“Oh, sure, split up,” she muttered aloud. “That always goes so well on Scooby Doo.”

She stayed on the roof just long enough to make sure Heimdall saw where she was going, then slid down the other side, dropped carefully from the eaves, and ran out through the back garden. The watcher would definitely catch up to her first, which was fine by Harleen; she knew from the maps she’d studied it would take Thor a good long while to find the next alley that cut through to this side in the direction he was currently running.

Either this was a particularly wealthy neighborhood, or all of Asgard was a lavish utopia -- Harleen was perfectly ready to believe the latter, given the little she’d seen of it so far -- but either way, the backstreet ran along large and elegant residential gardens, most of them enclosed by walls much higher than the ones lining the front avenue. Harleen slowed to a jog until Heimdall had time to come back into view, then she sped back up into a full tilt, aiming for a open gate further ahead.

From a distance, it looked as if it led into another alley, but if she remembered right from the maps, it _should_ be… yes! Another garden, attached to a dark and shuttered house, apparently unoccupied. Even better.

Harleen took a hairpin turn through the gate, grabbed a handy little piece of statuary -- some kind of religious icon she didn’t recognize made of a silvery metal lighter than she’d prefer, but still hopefully up to the job -- and pressed herself immediately against the wall on the blind side of the gate. She had just a second or two to catch her breath before Heimdall rushed in after her, stumbling to a stop as he realized he was in a dead end.

The icon made an immensely satisfying _crack!_ noise across the back of his head and he dropped like a stone.

“Didn’t see _that_ coming, didja, nosy?” she asked his unconscious form smugly.

Annoyingly, he’d fallen right in the path the gate needed to swing across, so Harleen had to waste a few crucial seconds dragging his body further into the garden before she could jump back over it to escape, yanking a few twigs off a nearby topiary deer as she went. Closing the gate, she stuffed the twigs into the latch, making sure they were shoved in tight enough to keep it from moving She didn’t know how long Heimdall would be out cold and needed to be certain he’d stay out of the way long enough to finish what needed to be done.

“Hold there, you little --”

 _Son of a bitch._ Heimdall’s body had delayed her long enough for Thor to find his cut-through, and now he was coming at her in the _opposite_ direction she needed him to be going. She could lead him around in a circle again, loop all the way back up to the main road and get back on track, or --

Running directly at Thor, Harleen came almost within arm’s reach, feinted to the left, then juked around him to the right as he snatched at her. She’d been counting on his momentum to keep him from correcting course in time to catch up with her, and it _almost_ worked. She stumbled backwards as heavy fingers found her forearm and just managed to catch her sleeve -- Thor had better reflexes than she’d given him credit for.

Whirling on him, she yanked her arm back towards her face, bringing Thor’s hand in close enough range for her to sink her teeth into the skin between his thumb and forefinger. He yelled and reflexively let go, shaking his hand with more annoyance than pain, and Harleen took off again, feet slapping the cobblestones as Thor resumed the chase.

Another gate, another garden, another wall to scramble over. The run was invigorating, was helping to clear the last traces of the headache away, but she was beginning to get winded. Harleen had gained enough distance with her shortcuts to risk a few seconds’ pause in a deep-set threshold so she wouldn’t be immediately visible, where she caught her breath and tried to plan out her next move.

It was just a little farther, she thought, but hadn’t counted on how similar these houses all looked lined up in the dark, and wasn’t entirely sure of her bearings. She’d need to get some height again, get a bird’s eye view and make sure she still had Thor on her tail; no point in any of this if she managed to shake him off completely.

Darting back out of the shadows, she found a trellis up to the next roof and scaled it hurriedly. There was a heart-wrenching moment of panic as one of its upper lattices snapped under her hand where the ivy hadn’t grown as thickly to reinforce it, but she’d already seized on the more secure eave and was able to pull herself the rest of the way up onto the roof.

Heart pounding, she shakily ascended up to where she could see into the next street and where she’d be helpfully outlined against the sky and easy to spot. Good; there was Thor coming up from behind, right on course. And over in that park, was that the fountain she was using as a landmark? Yes, good, she could just see its statue of Odin through the trees. Which meant that just past that high wall, down that little dead-end lane…

 _Yes!_ Harleen’s heart bubbled up joyously, butterflies erupting into a giddy dance as she found the curving points of Loki’s helmet, the familiar silhouette of his cloak, the full height of the scepter elongated into its staff form. She didn’t see Gungnir anywhere, but if he was in position, he had to have secured it by now.

He was flanked by two more figures, and another two waited at the opening to the lane; those would be the guards the scepter had… persuaded to lend a helping hand. Extra numbers never hurt when provoking an angry Thor.

With renewed glee, Harleen made her way back to the ground and led Thor merrily through the park and around the fountain. Glancing over her shoulder to ensure he had clear line-of-sight on her, she bounded up to a tree by the park’s far end, leapt for a straight-ish branch, and swung through it up to the wall with a perfect [glide kip](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JYEjJcPnxU), just to show off. Swinging over to the other side of the wall, she dropped to the ground, taking the impact on her left shoulder so she could roll over it and spring to her feet.

“Mr. L, you’re all right!” she squealed, running for him. The guards had tensed at her sudden appearance, weapons at the ready, but relaxed at a curt gesture from Loki, who beamed at Harleen and welcomed her into his arms.


	32. Chapter 32

They kissed like they’d been apart for days instead of maybe an hour. It went on long enough that even Loki’s ensorcelled minions began to get uncomfortable, awkwardly fixing their unnaturally bright blue eyes on any point other than at the two of them, and Harleen didn’t give a fuck. She draped her arms around Loki’s neck, he in turn wrapping his free arm around her waist to draw her closer, their bodies pressed hungrily against one another.

They only barely separated when a scuffle at the opening of the lane finally heralded Thor’s arrival. Harleen half-twisted in Loki’s embrace to watch him try valiantly to overpower the guards without risking injury to any of them, but they had no such compunctions, and he reluctantly allowed them to pin his arms behind his back and march him to stand a few feet away from Loki and Harleen.

“He followed me home,” she teased, turning back to look up at Loki with pleading eyes. “Can we keep him?”

Loki laughed and tightened his arm around her, pretending to consider it. “Hmm… Are you certain, Harley? ‘Twould be _much_ responsibility, and you know he would only make noise and ruin the furnishings.”

“Aww, he ain’t so bad!” she argued. “Just needs to be trained, maybe exercised every once in a while.”

“I can speak with experience that he costs a small fortune to feed,” Loki pointed out.

Harleen pondered this. “Hmm. Good point. Bet he’s not housebroken, either.”

“I know some servants who would agree with you on that.”

“On the other hand --”

“Heimdall was right; you two really are as bad as each other,” Thor interrupted with a grumble, having apparently lost his patience for the argument.

 _See? Not so fun, is it, being talked_ **_about_ ** _instead of_ **_to?_ ** Harleen thought spitefully, glancing back over her shoulder at him again. He was giving her an odd look, glancing back and forth between her face and one of the enthralled guards, and she realized he was trying to compare their eye colors in the dim moonlight.

“Why is that always the first thing people assume?” Harleen demanded in sulky undertones. “I am _not_ brainwashed! No offense,” she added hastily to the nearest guard.

“Why should I take offense, when I have such freedom and enlightenment as I have never known?” he asked rapturously.

“Creepy,” she muttered, and let Loki release her, pushing her out of the way so he could face Thor directly.

“To business, then, I suppose,” he said.

Harleen slipped around to insinuate herself under his left arm, molding herself to his side there where she could easily look back and forth between the brothers.

“Why, Loki?” Thor wanted to know. “Why must we keep returning to this, over and over again? Is there no end to the suffering you are willing to cause with your petty games and mad quest for power? Is the throne really worth all this?”

“You tell me,” Loki answered with a small smile. “It is yours now, is it not? You are most welcome, by the by.”

“Not willingly!” Thor protested. “And only because _you_ \--”

“Saved your life? No need to thank me for that, either.”

“ _Thank_ you?! I ought to imprison you for the next century just for _being_ here, never mind everything you’ve done since your return!”

“You see what I must endure?” Loki asked Harleen in a perfectly audible stage whisper.

“ _So_ ungrateful,” she answered in the same way. “How do you put up with him?”

“What now, then, brother?” Thor cut in. “You didn't have your witchgirl bring me here just for mockery and spite, I take it.”

Loki spread his hands, the scepter still held loosely in one. The gesture was causal, guileless, but Harleen felt him tense, readying for a potential fight. “Ah, but you know me. I never could resist the opportunity for mockery and spite. At any rate, what else could I hope to accomplish? We both know you could easily best my men --”

“ _My_ men.”

“-- if you chose,” Loki continued smoothly, as if he had not been interrupted.

“You have something up your sleeve; you always do,” Thor accused.

“Well, now that you mention it…” Loki considered the matter with exaggerated thoughtfulness. “I do have a small favor to ask.”

“You really expect me to do you any favors right now?”

“I assure you, this one will be to your benefit as well.”

Thor set his mouth stubbornly. “That’s what you said about the bilgesnipe.”

“And I was right, was I not?” Loki reminded him with a grin. “Your tutors left you in peace for a full week after that.”

“Only because --” Thor began heatedly, then broke off and shook his head. “Enough of your distractions. What is this favor?”

“Your quest for the Cube continues, yes?” Loki said, suddenly serious. “I care not where you go among the rest of our neighbors to seek it out, but leave Niflheim to me. I have unfinished business to complete there.”

“What business?” Thor demanded, immediately suspicious. “Claiming the Cube for yourself, like as not! I’ll not be told where I can and cannot seek, especially not by one with his own interest in finding it. Asgard _needs_ that Cube to repair the Bifrost and return peace to the land.”

“I tell you truly that you will not find the Cube there -- only death,” Loki warned.

“We are no longer children, Loki,” said Thor. “Dire words will not frighten me off.”

Loki simply shrugged. “Believe as you like and seek where you like, then,” he said. “But do not hold me to account when your men are caught betwixt me and my goal.”

“You have so many crimes to account for, what matter it if I did?”

Harleen fought back a yawn. Her interest was beginning to wane in the bickering and she let her attention wander, looking up at the sky to try and find new constellations to make out of the unfamiliar stars.

Letting the gods’ words wash over her, she picked out the abstract outlines of animals and cartoon characters and everyday objects, and even found a nice little cluster that could almost be drawn into a perfect five-pointed star. _A star made of stars._ It had a poetic ring to it, and she was just searching for a way to make another, larger outline around it and expand the fractal further when she realized Thor was actually addressing her directly.

“I am well accustomed to my brother’s schemes,” he was saying as she reluctantly let him pull her attention back to the ground, “but what could you possibly have to gain by helping him? Surely, you must know it is only a matter of time before he turns on you in earnest; it is his nature. There are dire stakes here that you cannot possibly understand, and...”

Harleen made an ostentatious point of covering the yawn she’d been holding in, but Thor didn’t seem to get the point. He was still talking, rambling on about “forces beyond the comprehension of mortals” or whatever. She gave him a few more seconds to see if he would wind down on his own, then got bored.

“What’s my name?” she interrupted flatly.

Thor trailed off mid-sentence somewhere around “untold numbers of innocent lives,” and stared at her. “Your name?”

Harleen rolled her eyes as she stepped forward to stand in front of Loki, annoyed at having to walk him through it. “Look, good job starting off by appealing to my own self-interest before you got into all the _pathos_ crap. That means you’re at least a little bit smarter than you act, although I honestly wouldn’t take bets on how much.

“But, some free advice?” she continued. “That kind of tactic is _way_ more effective if you open it addressing your subject by name. Humanizes you, puts you on even footing, gives you a sense of authority when you speak to their benefit, whatever. Trust me; this is kinda my job, or at least it used to be. You lose out on a _lot_ of psychological advantages when you don’t do something as simple as saying a name. So, what’s mine?”

Thor looked from Harleen to Loki, baffled. “Where did you find this one, brother?”

Loki shrugged. “In a box underground. Midgard is a strange place. I believe she asked you a question?” he added, placing a hand on Harleen’s shoulder.

Thor folded his arms defensively. “How am I possibly to know the answer? Am I meant to pluck thoughts from heads now? Names from the air around me? Her games make less sense than yours, if such a thing is possible.”

“Oh, gee, I don’t know,” Harleen snapped. He’d gone back to talking about her like she couldn’t understand the conversation, and it was all the more irritating in stark contrast with Loki behind her, backing her up.

Harleen wasn’t used to that, couldn’t remember the last time she’d had someone in her corner, supporting her without trying to fight _for_ her. It started a small spark at the pit of her stomach that comfortingly warmed her at the same time that it ignited her dislike for Thor’s condescension into a brightly burning anger. “You were super damn quick to get all self-righteous on my behalf back at Loki’s, so it might have occurred to you to give a shit about _who_ you were speaking for.”

“You were eavesdr--” Thor began indignantly, but Harleen was only just getting started. She advanced a few steps on him, Loki slipping the hand from her shoulder as he stood silently back to watch.

“Or earlier tonight, maybe, when I turned up on your doorstep all sad and wounded and pathetic. You had plenty of chances to ask me _then_. Hell, if I’d really been that bad off, I probably would have found it comforting to have someone genuinely care. But why would you, when you could make it all about you and your chance to play the hero again? I could’ve been swapped out for Damsel in Distress #412, and you’d never have noticed.”

“Would you even have told the truth?” Thor demanded.

“You’ll never fucking know, will you? You’re missing the point, dummy,” she scolded, planting herself in front of him and leaning belligerently forward with her fists balled up at her sides. “You _also_ missed the fact that _Loki said my name_ right the fuck in front of you like two minutes ago, didn’t you? I’m not enough of a person to you for you to even pay attention to, but you have the balls to tell me what I ‘surely must understand,’ you arrogant fucking tightass? Screw you.”

Harleen turned her back on him and made to pace disdainfully back towards Loki, but there was a pair of shouts from behind her as Thor easily shrugged off the guards holding him like he’d only been waiting for his moment and grabbed her from behind. One arm yanked her backwards, wrapping around her shoulders to lock her against him while the other held Mjolnir threateningly with the heavy weight of the star-metal inches from her skull.

The guards hurriedly backed off but kept their swords pointed at him, the air thick with tension. Only Loki seemed unphased, calmly observing the stand-off as if it were a mildly interesting sporting event. “Taking hostages now, Thor?” he asked. “Really?”

“Well, brother?!” Thor demanded in response. “If you truly care for her life, you’ll release these men from your sorcery and submit yourself to answer for your treachery!”

If he was expecting her to scream or struggle, Thor was going to be disappointed. Harleen made eye contact with Loki, gave him a little eye-roll, and sighed dramatically. “Is he always this predictable?” she asked.

Loki’s lips gave an amused twitch. “Very nearly.”

Harleen turned her head to look up at Thor as well as she could without bumping against the hammer. “So… What, you’re trying to prove some point, show me that Loki wouldn’t actually give himself up for me if it came down to it? Because that’s honestly not a bad play; well done and everything. Of course, it works better if you’re not obviously bluffing, so…” She shrugged awkwardly in his grip. “Better luck next time?”

“Do you doubt my conviction?!” Thor asked, hefting Mjolnir a little.

“Just look at the poor guy,” Harleen cooed, insincere sympathy oozing from her voice as she turned back to address Loki. “All he wants is a problem he can solve by hitting it enough times with his big ol’ hammer.”

“What an enormous pity for him that he has nowhere to direct such an inelegant solution,” Loki responded theatrically.

“Nope. Just his only brother…”

“His own men…”

“And the girl he very solemnly swore wouldn’t get hurt tonight.” Harleen leaned back again to smirk up at Thor. “Now, do you mind? This is one of those hugs that’s been going on long enough to get kinda awkward.”

Still, Thor didn’t let go just yet. “That was an oath deceitfully wrought!”

“But an oath sworn nevertheless,” Loki answered coolly. “And one which we all know you’ve no intention of breaking this night, even if you were otherwise capable of harming a… relatively… innocent mortal. You may as well release her.”

Thor’s shoulders slumped in sullen defeat, and the arm wrapped around Harleen slackened. Pushing her way free, she darted back to Loki and turned to let him hold her close in front of him, his arm curling posessively around her shoulders in almost the same way Thor’s had. She felt his lips brush the top of her head and made a smug face at Thor as the guards hastily restrained him again.

He let them do it with grudging grace, his gaze fixed resentfully on Loki. “Well?” he asked. “You’ve asked your favor, and I’ve answered. Do whatever you mean to do next, so we can be done with this.”

“By all means,” Loki answered pleasantly. He waved an airy hand at the two guards flanking him and Harleen and gestured for them to join the others. “Be so kind as to accompany my good brother back to the palace, won’t you? I’m sure he’ll wish to have words regarding how carelessly you found yourselves in this position, once your senses have returned.”

“Of course, my lord,” they answered readily.

“What trick now?” Thor asked, side-eying Loki with suspicion. “You will release my men, as simply as that?”

“Naturally,” Loki answered generously. “I have no further use for them. As you put it, I have received my answer and no more needs be said. Of course, I believe I shall retain a firm hold on their minds until we’ve plenty of distance between us, but that is merely for my own protection. Let us part in peace, brother.”

“Peace? You?” Thor gave a skeptical snort. “Wherever you go, there is war, ruin, and death!”

“Are those your words, or Father’s? They have his distinctive odor of self-righteousness.”

“How _dare_ you speak of him, after what you --”

“Oh, calm yourself, Thor,” Loki interrupted with a weary sigh. “The old man will be perfectly well on the morrow; I’ve not done him any lasting harm, which is more than you might say had I not interceded. Now take your men and depart.”

Thor looked affronted. “And leave you to carry on your mischief?”

“Well…” Loki grinned cheekily and Harleen’s knees weakened a little. “It _is_ what I am known for.”

“And you expect me to just walk away and permit it?”

“Do you have any better course of action to propose?” Loki asked. “Even with six of us to your one, you know that I would prefer to avoid taking you on directly, and I know that you cannot permit yourself to risk injury to innocents while any other path is open to you. We can, as I suggested, part in peace, or we can stand here and stare at one another until morning comes. I leave the choice in your hands, brother.”

 _God, it sounds_ **_exhausting_ ** _being the good guy,_ Harleen thought, watching Thor trying furiously to think of a third option, without apparent success. _So many other people’s lives you have to consider. How do they get anything done?_

Finally, Thor grunted, which appeared to be the closest he was going to get to admitting Loki was right or even saying goodbye, and turned to stride angrily back to the top of the lane, followed by the obedient guards.

Loki watched him go through narrowed, calculating eyes. Harleen waited impatiently until Thor turned the corner and disappeared, then whirled on Loki and kissed him again. Tucking the scepter into the crook of his arm, he picked her up and held her where she could slip a hand around his head and pull him deeper into the kiss.

After indulging her for another moment or two, Loki pulled back to look at her. “Did you get it?” he asked seriously.

“Whaddaya take me for?” Harleen answered with a grin. Reaching into her pocket, she pulled out the ring of shiny keys she’d taken from Thor during his ransom attempt and dangled them in Loki’s face with a little jingle. “I told you I would.”


	33. Chapter 33

“Excellent.” Loki took the keys from Harleen and dropped her, suddenly all business again. She scowled up at him, but he was ignoring her, concentrating instead on flipping through the keys and examining each one closely. “You ought to return to the boat while I visit the dungeons. “The men have been instructed to delay Thor’s return, but time will still be short.”

“To the dungeons?” Harleen asked. “So you  _ are _ going after Odin while he’s weak, then?”

“Yes, what of it?” Loki answered inattentively. He seemed to have found the one he wanted, though Harleen couldn’t tell how. None of the keys seemed to have any distinguishing markings.

“See, this is why you should fill me in on the  _ whole _ plan, not just what you think I need to know,” she answered with a sigh. “Thor didn’t send him to the dungeons. You probably didn’t hear ‘cause you were kinda distracted at the time, but he decided to use his own rooms instead.”

Loki snapped his gaze away from the keys to stare at her, color draining from his face. “His  _ own..? _ ” he began before trailing off.

Now that she finally had his full attention, Harleen smile beatifically and folded her arms. “Yep. He might be an idiot, but he’s nicer than you are. Said he wanted to keep him out of the public eye and away from your mom, and probably didn’t like the idea of seeing Daddy Dearest behind bars, either. Aren’tcha glad  _ someone _ was listening, even if you weren’t?”

“Why did you not  _ say  _ something?” Loki demanded, an angry flush rushing in to replace the lost color in his cheeks. “Thor doesn’t keep his own key with the others! Everything we’ve done this night has been for naught!”

“Oh, calm down,” she said, unconcerned. “Not  _ everything.  _ You still managed to get Pointy Stick #2, I assume, and besides --”

“ _ Calm down?! _ ” he fired back. “If I don’t deal with the All-Father  _ now _ , before he --”

“And  _ besides _ ,” Harleen repeated, raising her voice over his, “I  _ do _ have a couple brain cells of my own. Here.” Digging back into her pocket, she located another key, smaller than the others, and tossed it at Loki with a smirk. “More wear and tarnish on that one, and kept near his chest, where he’d have easier access for daily use and it’d be psychologically closer to his heart. Seemed like a safe bet.”

The anger and panic switched off like a light as Loki caught the key and looked at it, and then he beamed at her, sweeping her up in his arms for another deep kiss. “You know, I have made some extraordinarily clever decisions in my life,” he said when he finally let her go, “but I believe pulling you out of that dreary mortal cesspit was one of my finest ideas yet.”

“Your wisdom is matched only by your modesty, my lord,” Harleen intoned with an eyeroll, snaking her arms back around him and kissing him again. One of his hands found a rip in her skirt and slipped up her leg, which she lifted to wrap around his, encouraging him higher up along her thigh.

“Didn’t you say you have to hurry?” she asked teasingly when they briefly broke apart for air.

The hand on her leg stopped, fingertips trembling slightly as if they were fighting to keep climbing while Loki was fighting just as hard to pull them back. “Damn it all, you distracting little temptation, I do,” he growled, and managed to find the willpower to withdraw his hand. “To the boat with you, before you steal more time than I have. And for the love of all nine realms, for once in your brief life, resist the urge to go wandering. If you’re not there when I return, I’m setting off without you.”

 

Harleen took the darkened steps back down into the little cliffside cave two at a time. She’d probably end up breaking an ankle doing that one of these days, but couldn’t bring herself to care just then. She was humming again, some outdated Top 40 tune she couldn’t be bothered to remember the name of, but stopped abruptly as she came down around the last bend into the cave.

Standing right at the lip of the cave and outlined in the bright moonlight pouring in, someone was watching her approach with curious interest.

“You are not precisely who I was anticipating,” the woman said. Her voice was low, cultured, warm. Backlit by the moon, it was difficult to clearly make out her face, but she didn’t seem particularly surprised to see Harleen in spite of her words.

“Well, I was ‘ _ not precisely anticipating _ ’ anyone at all, so who the hell are you, then?” Harleen asked shortly, taking a few slow, suspicious steps closer.

“And a pleasant ‘well met’ to you as well.” The corner of the stranger’s mouth quirked slightly upwards with wry amusement in an expression so recognizably Loki’s that, for a second, Harleen was positive that he was there in disguise to play some stupid joke or something. She opened her mouth to tell him exactly what she thought of his ridiculous games, but shut it abruptly as she put the pieces together and realized who the woman had to be.

“If you’re looking for Loki, he’s not here,” she said instead.

“I can see that,” Frigga answered calmly, then sighed softly. “It’s just as well, I suppose. I know not what I thought I might say to him -- certainly nothing he would hear in his present mood. Perhaps you and I might speak in his stead, however. I’ve heard little of you, and must admit my curiosity. Come.”

She turned back out to study the night sky, obviously expecting Harleen to come and join her.  _ Damn Asgardians. Even the nice ones are compulsively bossy, apparently. Guess that’s what happens when you go around getting called gods  _ **_and_ ** _ royalty for thousands of years. _

“Think I’ll stay right where I am, thanks,” she replied, out of as much defiance as caution. Frigga gave a little ‘suit yourself’ shrug -- another gesture eerily reminiscent of one of Loki’s -- and continued as if Harleen were right beside her.

“He’s been coming down to this cavern since he was a boy,” she said, a trace of wistfulness coloring her voice. Harleen awkwardly shifted her weight, wondering if she’d be quite so nostalgic if she knew what the boy in question was doing upstairs at this exact moment. “No one else has bothered with it since long and long before then, but he always did have a fondness for finding hidden ways and secret places. He’d oftentimes use them to hide, or escape his lessons, or sneak back home after one of his and Thor’s misadventures they thought I didn’t know about.”

She laughed a little, more to herself than for Harleen’s benefit, and Harleen couldn’t resist taking a few steps closer and dipping into interview-mode just a little, subtly nudging the reminiscing along so she could find out more. Old habits and all that.

“It sounds like they used to be pretty close,” she said, reflexively slipping a hand into her pocket for a pen that wasn’t there.

If Loki’s mother noticed what she was doing, she didn’t seem to mind. “They were and they weren’t,” she sighed. “They spent so much time together, but it was time spent in torment of one another as often as not. They see the world so differently that neither of them have ever truly seen how much they share. And what of you?” she asked abruptly, glancing back towards Harleen. “You must have family somewhere far from here.”

Harleen blinked. It was an innocent enough question, almost pointedly banal, but she wasn’t accustomed to casual conversations that went two ways, and something about Frigga -- maybe even just her Loki-like mannerisms -- made Harleen suspect an ulterior motive.

“One brother, but we don’t talk much,” she answered briefly. “Mom’s a medical doctor, orthopedics; Dad spent most of my childhood in jail. White collar stuff, mostly, financial fraud, small-time cons, that sort of thing.” That last was offered up without shame or expectation. Harleen was used to telling the story. It was the sort of thing that was bound to come up sooner or later when you worked with the government, and avoiding the subject just made it look like she had something to hide.

Besides, it gave a plausible excuse for why she’d wanted to go into criminal psychology to begin with; she’d written more than one heart-wringing application essay about her drive to better understand the distorted thought processes of her tragically estranged father. All bullshit, of course, but  _ compelling _ and  _ sympathetic _ bullshit, and that was what mattered.

“A healer and a charlatan?” Frigga asked, turning to face Harleen directly. Her tone was inscrutable. “That’s… interesting.”

“If you want to put it that way, I guess.” Harleen shrugged.

“I had rather intended this meeting to lay curiosity to rest, but it seems to have done just the opposite,” the goddess mused. “Not precisely who I was anticipating at all.”

_ She never planned to see Loki to begin with,  _ Harleen realized suddenly.  _ She just wanted to see what my deal was the whole time. _

“You have my thanks for the diverting conversation, but it is past time I departed,” Frigga said, already moving serenely past Harleen to the exit. “I suspect the whole castle will be in something of an uproar by now, and I must do my part to settle it.”

She flashed her a warm, genuine smile, and a conspiratorial wink, making Harleen wonder again just how much she knew of what had been going on upstairs.

“Oh, and Harleen?” she added abruptly, pausing in the doorway.

Harleen swallowed back the snarky farewell she’d been beginning and looked at Frigga suspiciously. She’d never introduced herself, but it didn’t seem at all surprising that  _ this _ Asgardian, at least, had done her homework.

“A word of advice, in the unlikely event you should choose to heed it,” Frigga continued, not waiting for Harleen to prompt her. “Your loyalty is commendable in its strength. Indeed, there are few mortals who can give themselves over into love so unreservedly, and there is great power in such conviction. However, my son is bound by his nature, as are we all. Soon or late, constancy must give way to chaos, and I fear you’ll find that love and loyalty will not be well rewarded during such times. I’ll not cast judgement upon affairs of the heart, for I know well the futility of such measures. Do as you will, child. Enjoy these times, for however long they may last. Simply be prepared for the day that they end, for greater souls than yours have broken in the face of the upheaval that is to come.”

A chill tingled down her spine at the heavy weight of the final words, and Harleen’s throat worked helplessly for a moment to find her voice again. “Not bad, but you’ll have to do some serious revising if that’s ever going to fit inside a fortune cookie,” she finally managed, proud of how steady it sounded, but Frigga was already gone.

Harleen blinked stupidly at the darkened archway for a moment, then smoothed her absolutely-not-shaking hands over her torn skirts and looked around for something to occupy herself until Loki returned.

Just then, he came down the bend that Frigga had just disappeared around, taking the steps two at a time himself and whistling a jaunty tune Harleen didn’t recognize. He had to have passed his mother on the narrow stairway, but gave no sign of having seen her, and Harleen couldn’t begin to think how to even broach the subject.

He didn’t give her a chance to, anyway. Sweeping her up in his arms, he dipped her backwards, kissed her hard, then led her protestingly through a brief dance to his whistled tune. She couldn’t help but get caught up in his good mood and she laughed as he twirled her around and kissed her again, squeezing her ass for good measure that time.

“Everything went well, I take it?” she asked as soon as Loki let her get a word in.

“Oh, quite,” he answered airily. “The old man is out of the way, and I believe I can trust Thor to do a reasonably terrible job running things until I have the time to step in and finally do the job properly.”

“Shame on you,” Harleen teased, jabbing a playfully scolding finger into his chest. “What was that you were promising Thor about no lasting harm for dear old dad?”

Loki made an exaggerated expression of offended innocence. “Only the absolute truth. No harm will come to him whatever; I am quite certain that the fine staff of Shady Acres Care Home will keep him in the best of health on Midgard, and well out of my way for the next several years at least. I did not promise that he would be quite  _ himself _ .”

“You underhanded cheat,” she accused with a grin, making it sound like the compliment it was.

Frigga’s cryptic warnings were already fading in the face of the more immediate and irresistible reality of Loki’s presence -- not forgotten, simply… filed away, added to the bottom of the Harleen’s ever-lengthening list of things to care about another day. Today, it didn’t matter. Today, she had everything she’d never known she’d always wanted, and -- today, at least -- that was enough.


	34. Chapter 34

“Don’t think I didn’t notice, by the way,” Harleen said drowsily, gazing up at the first fingers of sunlight creeping across the ceiling above Loki’s bed.

“Notice what?” he asked, lifting his head from where he’d been slowly grazing his lips up the inside of her thigh. The more smug he was feeling, she’d noticed, the more he liked to take his time, and they’d spent half the night since their victorious return teasing and tormenting each other, slowly spiraling in on finally finishing what Thor had interrupted yesterday afternoon.

Harleen lifted herself up on one elbow and pushed a tangled blonde lock hair out of her face, smirking down at Loki. “You were testing me again. At least three times that I counted.”

“Was I, now?” He grinned back up at her, resting a hand on her leg and casually running his thumb in little circles along her skin.

“I was thinking about it, and you  _ had _ to have heard Thor’s plans for Odin at the same time I did. You just didn’t say anything because you wanted to see if  _ I _ heard it and if I was smart enough to adapt on my own.”

“That’s an interesting theory,” Loki said noncommittally, lowering his head to return to his meandering track up her thigh. She could tell, though, from the angle of his neck and the way the corner of his mouth twitched that she was right, and that she’d won a few more points for having caught him in it.

“ _ And _ ,” she pressed on, eager to prove herself, “I’m thinking it was no accident that Heimdall caught up with Thor and me while you were off who-knows-where. You always meant for him to, didn’t you, just to see if I could handle the curveball?”

“How  _ did _ you deal with him?” Loki asked curiously, lifting his head again. For him, it was tantamount to a flat-out confession, and Harleen leaned triumphantly back against the pillows, stretching her free leg out to twine around one of his.

“Hit him in the head with something heavy and locked him in someone’s backyard,” she answered, shrugging luxuriously and flexing her hips slightly to urge him back to his task.

Loki made a distasteful  _ moue _ , clearly disapproving of her inelegant methods.

“Don’t give me that face!” she scolded, playfully swatting at the back of his head.

In less than a heartbeat, he’d disentangled himself from Harleen and lunged forward to tower over her, her legs pushed apart around him and her wrists pinned to the bed.

“And here I thought you’d finally learned your place,” he said with a theatrical sigh. His hair had fallen to frame his face as he stared her down with a wild glint in his smiling eyes. “I will remind you, kitten, that I shall give you  _ whatever _ I wish…” He ground his hips against hers for emphasis. “... _ whenever  _ I wish.”

Harleen laughed and tilted her head back, tongue curled up between her teeth. “Haven’t you noticed,  _ my lord? _ ” she asked, shaping her lips around the last two syllables with pointed and loving mockery. “I  _ never _ learn. Maybe you should try teaching me again, though, just in case.”

She lifted her hips a few inches above the bed to press urgently against his hardness. Loki growled and increased the pressure on her wrists, leaning heavily against her as he bent down to brush his lips across her ear.

“Perhaps I shall,” he murmured, then abruptly sat up and shifted his weight to yank free one of the woven cords tying back the bed’s curtains.

Giggling delightedly, Harleen snatched her hands away, making him chase them, making him wrestle her arms together as her hands darted and slipped away from his attempts to bind them. Finally, he managed to get the cord wrapped tightly around both her wrists and secured to a bedpost above her head.

She faked a pout and tugged at the thin rope for principle’s sake, but Loki had tied the knots so tightly she couldn’t even manage to make them wiggle.

“Looks like ya got me,” she conceded. “Now whatcha gonna do with me? Because if --”

Loki shut her up with his mouth on hers, bearing down on her like a tidal wave. She was still wearing the blue dress, its skirt long since hiked up around her waist, and his hands found the strategic tear in her collar to rip it the rest of the way open so he could play freely with her breasts while they kissed. Harleen hauled on the rope, using it to pull herself up and drive harder against his mouth, her legs tightening around his waist.

Breaking apart again, Loki pushed her back down to the bed with a hand on her chest, using the other to push her skirt up higher over her stomach and position himself at her entrance. Harleen squeezed her eyes shut and tensed, bracing herself eagerly for -- nothing, apparently.

Opening one eye, she scowled up at Loki to see what the delay was. He was holding her lips just apart with his tip, laughter in his eyes, delighting in making her wait.

“What was the third time?” he asked.

Harleen blinked in confusion. “What?”

“Three times I tested you, you counted. What was the third?”

She scowled up at him. He had to already know, or else he wouldn’t be asking  _ now _ , when he knew she’d confess immediately just to be done with the subject and move on.

“There wasn’t one,” she admitted sulkily. “I just assumed there had to be at least one more, and hoped you’d give it away if you thought I already knew.”

He laughed, but the lack of surprise in his features confirmed he’d been a step ahead. “Clever, kitten,” he encouraged her. “But not clever enough.” Loki bent over her to kiss her neck, pushing her legs up and giving her another inch or so in the process. Harleen gasped sharply, then whimpered.

“More,” she pleaded.

His lips wandered up her neck to her ear, his hair brushing along her arm where it was pulled up over her head.

“Tell me you love me.”

It was the second time he’d ever made that order, but there was no fear or confusion or hesitation in her reply this time. Harleen savored each delicious word, enunciating them one at a time. “I… love… you.”

Another gasp as he drove into her with his full length, and Harleen’s arms flexed against the ropes as she instinctively tried to grip his shoulders, needing to hold on tightly to him as he moved against her.

“My god, Loki, I love you,” she repeated, the words breathy and strained this time, barely audible around each rise and fall. Her hair fell into her face, and he pushed it away again and pressed his lips back onto hers. Harleen’s eyes closed and she moaned softly around his tongue as it probed deeper.

She felt Loki’s weight shift again, pausing in his rhythm, and she opened her eyes just a hair to see what he was up to. Her eyes widened sharply with an eager little intake of breath to see he’d leaned over to retrieve and unsheath a small silver dagger from where his clothes lay at the foot of the bed, then narrowed again with a little disappointment as she realized he had only gotten it to cut the rope binding her wrists.

Loki caught both expressions, and the knife’s blade paused a fraction of an inch from the cord. “Oh, really, now?” he asked, one eyebrow lifted in an elegant facsimile of surprise.

Harleen licked her lips and smiled. “Too weird for you?” she challenged him.

He didn’t answer right away, but slowly withdrew the knife, leaving her bindings intact, and let it wander down the length of her arms, the flat of the blade sliding coldly and smoothly along her skin.

“On the contrary,” he murmured as he reached her shoulder and continued in along her collarbone at a ponderous pace, “I am finding myself continually amazed by you, Harleen. I think to myself that surely no, here she must balk, and I will at last have discovered the limits of her kind, and yet I am beginning to believe that I might explore every wicked thought, every…” Here, the blade arrived between her clavicles and twirled almost balletically in his fingers before coming to rest with its point nipping into the hollow of her exposed throat. “...Every dark desire I have ever known, and still never find your end.”

His voice washed hypnotically over her, and Harleen’s eyelids fluttered, her breath coming in long, shallow gulps of air that just barely nudged the dagger’s point deeper against her skin.

It was stupid to even try to speak when any sudden movement might leave her with an accidental tracheotomy, but it would take a worse threat than that to ever keep Harleen from opening her mouth. “Why don’t you test that theory?” she asked in a shallow whisper, and Loki smirked.

The knifepoint danced away from her throat and skimmed down between her breasts, leaving behind the thinnest of red lines in its wake. The blade was so sharp, its course so smooth, that Harleen didn’t initially feel anything but a faint tickle until the air rushed in and it stung sharply like a papercut.

She hadn’t planned to give him the satisfaction of hearing her pain, but she couldn’t help the high gasp that slipped out, just for a moment. Loki didn’t seem to hear it; however. He had cut away what little remained of the dress with one purposeful slice, and was now sitting back to watch the dagger’s journey over her bare stomach, tracing out curving lines and lightly sweeping gestures like an artist intent on his creation.

A few seconds after the stinging pain followed the tickling sensation, Harleen felt an odd but familiar warmth spreading along the same course, following the lines Loki left in her skin. Bending her chin down to see her chest, she watched with interest as the top of his first cut faded and vanished with nothing to show it had ever been.

_ Of course, he wouldn’t want to risk scarring up his favorite toy _ , she thought cynically, but she couldn’t help being fascinated by its progress. The healing continued down her sternum, following in time with the new pattern he was creating below; it lent an odd impression of a narrow red snake dancing along Harleen’s skin in complex circles and swirls guided by Loki’s whim and the tip of his knife.

Mesmerized, she let her head relax back and continued watching the snake slide seductively along through half-closed eyes. It progressed lazily over her hip and across her thigh, her femoral artery continuing to pump with blissful ignorance of the blade separated from it by a mere inch of meat. The knife’s point skipped across to her other leg and meandered slowly back up again to her waist. The harsh sting trailed along in the dagger’s wake, followed shortly thereafter by the warm tingle that smoothed away all trace of pain.

_ If only all scars were so easy to erase, _ Harleen thought. But they were now, weren’t they? With Loki, nothing had to hurt forever. In Asgard, there was nothing that couldn’t be made perfect. Worlds away, humanity could keep fucking up Earth all it wanted, slowly destroying themselves and each other and everything around them, but she and she alone had spoken with the serpent and eaten the fruit of knowledge and gained re-admittance to Paradise.

Harleen had never thought of herself as a religious person. She was a doctor, a scientist, a  _ realist _ . Blind faith served no one but those who created it in others. But maybe…

Maybe that was because she’d never before found something worth believing in.

Belief didn’t begin to cover it. Love didn’t even cover it. Harleen  _ worshipped _ Loki as only a god could be worshipped: a beautiful, terrifying, brilliant, infuriating, capricious god who had somehow chosen  _ her _ as his disciple.

Loki looked up at Harleen’s face from where he was still playing with the dagger and its intimate dance across her flesh, and flashed her a smile, dangerous, seductive, exhilarating.

“Hold still,” he ordered softly.

Harleen was like stone. Nothing could have moved her but Loki’s own voice releasing her to motion again.

The blade skimmed up her stomach and circled closely around her left nipple before coming to rest at the upper swell of her breast, just left-of-center in her chest. Directly beneath it, her heart pounded a double-time beat of anticipation.

Loki’s hand on the hilt as steady as carved ice, the knife bit deeper into her skin than it had before -- not by much, but enough for the pain to creep in and surround the cold steel as it moved, and this time, there was no healing warmth to take it away.

Eyes closed in ecstasy, breath stopped in her throat, Harleen felt Loki trace out the unmistakable lines of an elegantly curled letter ‘L’ over her heart, and knew that his mark would be forever etched there.

  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Loki and Harleen will return in _Gravity._ Check back next week for the release schedule and a preview of the next installment!


	35. "Gravity" Preview

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Below is a sneak-peek chapter for _Gravity_ , book 2 in the _All It Takes_ trilogy.
> 
> I mean, probably a trilogy. That's what it's looking like right now, but who knows? I have a rough outline of the overall arc I want to take it through, but it might end up getting divided up differently. Trilogy seems likely, though.
> 
> I skipped around a little to write this preview chapter because it's been in my head for a while now, but I'll be taking the rest of the summer to go back and get _Gravity_ built up from the beginning. Regular weekly updates will begin on Friday, August 31st and continue every Friday thereafter, barring life happening.
> 
> Also, I have a **[Tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/romanticallyrecursive)** now! idek what for, really; it just seemed like the thing to do at the time. I've mostly just been dicking around with graphics this week, but you can follow me there if you want to ask questions or make requests or just chat or whatever since I won't be on AO3 as often until _Gravity_ starts up.
> 
> Okay, preview below. This is your formal **spoiler warning.** Enjoy!  
> .  
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Harleen ran her thumb across the scar over and over and over, like a rosary, like a talisman, like a keepsake. She should stop, she knew. Keep her hands still, don’t call attention to it, leave it alone. The nurse hadn’t seemed to notice it yet; why should she, amid all the newer scrapes and cuts and bruises that Harleen had picked up in the fall?

Still, Harleen should stop. She would stop. In a minute. Over and over, she retraced the L, and she didn’t stop until the nurse glanced up from her chart, and Harleen finally managed to drop both hands into her lap and keep them there with effort, fingers interlocking until they clenched white.

The nurse smiled at Harleen. What was her name? Christina, Clarice, something with a C, anyway. Harleen hadn’t bothered committing it to memory. She seemed nice, though. Busy, distracted, perpetually overworked, but nice.

“I just need to get some of your details, and then we can probably get you out of here,” she said kindly. “You don’t have a concussion and everything else looks good on a preliminary assessment, but we may need to check for internal bleeding. I know it might be difficult to talk about, but it would help us to know what --”

“My boyfriend pushed me out of his car,” Harleen interrupted emotionlessly. “We had a fight.” That was close enough to the truth, anyway. It would at least help explain how she’d turned up out of nowhere in the middle of three lanes of oncoming traffic.

The nurse’s mouth tightened at the corners. She hid it well behind a professional mask Harleen knew all too familiarly, but she was angry,  _ furiously _ angry on Harleen’s behalf. How nice of her.

Still, her voice was as calm and brisk as ever as she said, “I would recommend pressing charges, but we can have someone in here to discuss your options with you if you like.”

Now, there was an exercise in futility if Harleen had ever heard one. Letting her attention drift from the interview, she watched raindrops splattering onto the hospital window. It was  _ weird _ to see actual weather again; Harleen hadn’t even realized how much she’d grown accustomed to Asgard’s perpetually pleasant sunshine until it was gone. She didn’t miss it.

Christie-Clara-Something must have interpreted Harleen’s apathy as disagreement, because her eyes narrowed and she asked, “You’re not thinking of going back to him, are you? You’re lucky to be alive, much less in as good condition as you are.”

Harleen didn’t bother looking back from the window. Instead, she refocused her gaze past the raindrops and onto the tumultuous clouds over the skyline. They were too thick for her to even try to pick out any stars. “That’s not really an option anymore,” she said dully.

“Good. I’ve seen too many --” A beeper trilled at the nurse’s waistband, and she glanced down, then snorted dismissively and turned back to Harleen’s chart.

“Need to take that?” Harleen asked.

“It’s not an emergency,” she answered, just as the pager went off again and she failed to cover an aggravated expression. “...Whatever  _ some people _ might think. Sorry, just one second.”

Harleen shrugged and went back to staring out the window while the nurse tapped out an impatient response. Her fingers twitched and she locked them back tightly together again, only distantly aware of the discomfort of the oximeter digging into the skin of her index finger as she squeezed it.

There was too much to process, too much to sort through, and she knew the thick wall of numbness was the only thing holding back a tidal wave of hatred and fury and heartbreak and, worst of all, a deafening chorus of ‘I told you so’s.

_ Never listen, do you, Harley? _

“Harley, huh? Cute name. It yours?”

Oops. Had that been out loud? Still, the nurse didn’t seem bothered by her talking to herself; she’d probably seen and heard a lot weirder in her line of work. Shock was a hell of a drug.

“Yeah,” Harleen answered shortly, and the nurse clicked her pen and jotted it on her clipboard.

“Got a last name to go with that?”

“Quin--” she began, then cut herself off. Idiot. She had to start thinking like a Midgar-- like a human again. S.H.I.E.L.D. would probably be very interested to see her name pop up in hospital records. Probably had flags set up to trip in every major city in the US if she turned up somewhere.

Fortunately, Christine or Claire or whatever apparently didn’t notice how abruptly she’d stopped talking. “That with two ‘n’s?”

“Sure.”  _ Why not? _

Before the nurse could ask for any more biographical details, the pager gave another beep and her lips tightened. “Sorry. Again. Let me just go deal with this; I’ll be back in five.”

It only took a minute or so in the silence of the now-empty room -- interrupted only by the hypnotizingly rhythmic beep and whirr of the outdated machinery -- for the ‘I told you so’s to come creeping in, sinuous and sarcastic and smug.

_ Betrayed? By  _ **_Loki?_ ** _ What a totally unexpected turn of events. _

_ Shut up. _

_ You knew this would happen. You knew it from the very start. Before you ever even opened that door, you knew where it was going. _

_ Shut up. Shutupshutupshutup! _

The monitor by the bed started beeping a little faster, and she forced herself to breathe deeply and start counting until her fists loosened and the plastic pressure of the sensor on her finger stopped digging hard into her palm.

It was Stark Tower all over again, but worse this time, so, so much worse. Worse because she’d let it happen  _ again _ . Worse because he was gone for good, and there was no chance he’d come back to undo it this time. Worse because she hadn’t loved him that time like she did now.

She found her thumb running back over the scar again, tracing and retracing over and over and counting every iteration.

_ That’s where you fucked up, Harley. That door. That night. I mean, sure, you fucked up a couple times before then, but we had it fixed. We had it under control. Things were  _ **_good_ ** _ at S.H.I.E.L.D. All the monsters were back under the bed where they belonged, and it was supposed to be easy coasting from there. Do you have any fucking idea how  _ **_hard_ ** _ we worked to get to that point? To where you could be normal, or at least pretend to be? All you had to do to keep it was nothing, and you couldn’t even manage that, could you? _

She put her hands over her ears and squeezed her eyes shut and it accomplished nothing. Can’t hide from your own self. Can’t block out your own voice.

_ Just had to lose your temper. Just had to satisfy your curiosity. Just had to go and fall in  _ **_lo~ove._ ** The last word twisted mockingly, sounding like a schoolyard taunt.

Where was that fucking nurse? Why wasn’t she back yet? What the  _ hell _ could possibly be more  _ important _ \--

The ridicule had been slowly, diligently chipping away at the protective wall of numbness and shock, but the waiting wave of anger grew impatient. It seethed and surged at the pit of her stomach, fed itself on petty irritations, and swelled into a furious flood that crashed down over her, shattering the wall and filling her eyes and ears and mind and drowning out everything, even the voices.

She choked, lungs clenched around nothing but air, and the edges of the hospital room went dim, filling her peripheral vision with blackening shadows. The monitor’s beeping picked up its pace again, crying out faster and faster until she ripped the oximeter from her finger, the clip scraping her skin, tearing up little shreds from her knuckles as she sat up and swung her legs out of the bed.

The monitor objected noisily, and she nearly drove her fist through it, but just managed to re-channel the motion, impatiently punching the right sequence of molded plastic buttons until the machine was soothed. Nothing wrong here. Not even a patient for anything to be wrong  _ with _ . Go back to sleep, little computer.

Breathe. Focus. Evaluate. The darkness around the edges of her vision had cleared a little, but still pulsed in time with her gradually-slowing heartbeat. There were no unusual sounds from the hallway, no running feet, no urgent voices. The spike had gone unnoticed. She probably didn’t have long before someone noticed her tampering, though, and What’s-Her-Face would be back any minute.

She put her feet flat on the ground and tested her weight. Left ankle twisted, but not sprained. Right knee skinned pretty viciously, but stable and already cleaned. She took another deep breath, the tunnel vision fading a little further as she did, and paid extra attention to how it felt. Sore, but not stabbing. Ribs bruised, not broken. The nurse was right; she had been lucky.

She moved forward, felt a tug at her arm, looked. IV. Saline drip. No point. Ripping the tape off with ruthless efficiency, she slid out the needle and left it dangling. Too much to do to wait around for another game of Twenty Questions. The gray had faded completely, and the room was in crystalline focus. The anger -- the beautiful, cleansing anger -- had washed out every trace of dullness and disconnect and left an exhilaratingly knife-sharp clarity in their place.

Loki was still somewhere out there. He might be worlds away, but that wouldn’t stop Harley from finding him. It didn’t stop Harley from loving him. It couldn’t stop Harley from destroying him.


End file.
